This is a digital copy of a book that was preserved for generations on library shelves before it was carefully scanned by Google as part of a project
to make the world's books discoverable online.
It has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the book to enter the public domain. A public domain book is one that was never subject
to copyright or whose legal copyright term has expired. Whether a book is in the public domain may vary country to country. Public domain books
are our gateways to the past, representing a wealth of history, culture and knowledge that's often difficult to discover.
Marks, notations and other marginalia present in the original volume will appear in this file - a reminder of this book's long journey from the
publisher to a library and finally to you.
Usage guidelines
Google is proud to partner with libraries to digitize public domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong to the
public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this work is expensive, so in order to keep providing this resource, we have taken steps to
prevent abuse by commercial parties, including placing technical restrictions on automated querying.
We also ask that you:
+ Make non-commercial use of the files We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files for
personal, non-commercial purposes.
+ Refrain from automated querying Do not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system: If you are conducting research on machine
translation, optical character recognition or other areas where access to a large amount of text is helpful, please contact us. We encourage the
use of public domain materials for these purposes and may be able to help.
+ Maintain attribution The Google "watermark" you see on each file is essential for informing people about this project and helping them find
additional materials through Google Book Search. Please do not remove it.
+ Keep it legal Whatever your use, remember that you are responsible for ensuring that what you are doing is legal. Do not assume that just
because we believe a book is in the public domain for users in the United States, that the work is also in the public domain for users in other
countries. Whether a book is still in copyright varies from country to country, and we can't offer guidance on whether any specific use of
any specific book is allowed. Please do not assume that a book's appearance in Google Book Search means it can be used in any manner
anywhere in the world. Copyright infringement liability can be quite severe.
About Google Book Search
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers
discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on the web
at |http : //books . google . com/
A practical hand-book of drawing
for modern methods of...
Charles George Harper
L
e - ^ ..
i
]
REESE LIBRARY
ol I Ml.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.
'^eceiveii
^f^t.^^ ./cSV;^.
zAicession^ No, u?^3^r^ CLiss Na.
ij
IfflT
Digitized
by Google
[tririvERsiTT,
Digitized
by Google
^i^
Digitized
by Google
OF • Ri.i-'Ro;-,
i']:\
5 (>\OOV : I :L- !'\!
Digitized
by Google
.^" vSfey^
ft^^^^it
f'
Digitized
by Google
A • PRACTICAL • HAND-
BOOK • OF • DRAWING
FOR MODERN METHODS
• OF • REPRODVCTION •
BY
CHARLES G. ^ARPER,
AUTHOR OF "ENGLISH PEN ARTISTS OF TO-DAY."
Illustrated with Drawings by several Hands, and with
Sketches by the Author showing Comparative Results ob-
tained by the several Methods of Reproduction now in Use,
[UNIVERSITY^
LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, Ld.
1894.
Digitized
by Google
H3
iiifi
Digitized
by Google
/lA/^
[university]
California.
TO CHARLES MO RLE Y, ESQ.
Dear Mr. Morley,
It is with a peculiar satisfaction that I
inscribe this book to yourself, for to you more than to
any other occupant of an editorial chair is due the position
held by ''process'' in illustrating the hazards and
happenings of each succeeding week.
Time was when the ''Pall Mall Budget^' with a
daring originality never to be forgotten, illustrated the
news with diagrams fashioned heroically from the some-
what limited armoury of the compositor. Nor I nor my
contemporaries, I think, have forgotten those weapons of
offence — the brass rules, hyphens, asterisks, daggers, braces,
and other common objects of the type-case — with which
the Northumberland Street printers set forth the details
of a procession, or the configuration of a country. There
was in those days a world of meaning — apart from
libellous innuendo — in a row of asterisks ; for did they
Digitized
by Google
IV DEDICATION.
not signify a chain of mountains ? And what Old Man
Eloquent was ever so vividly convincing as those serpentine
brass rules thai served as the accepted hieroglyphics for
rivers on type-set maps ?
These were the beginnings of illustration in the ** Pall
Mall Budget " when you first filled the editorial chair.
The leaps and bounds by which you came abreast of {and,
indeed, overtook) the other purveyors of illustrated news,
hot and hot, I need not recount, nor is there occasion here
to allude to the events which led to what some alliterative
iournalist has styled the Battle of the Budgets. Only
this : that if others have reaped where you have sown,
why ! 'twas ever thus.
For the rest, I must needs apologize to you for a
breach of an etiquette which demands that permission be
first had and obtained before a Dedication may be printed.
To print an unauthorized tribute to a private individual
is wrong: when {as in the present case) an Editor is
concerned I am not sure that the wrong-doing halts
anything before lese majeste.
Yours very truly,
CHARLES G. HARPER.
London,
May, 1894.
Digitized
by Google
L'Br
OF THE
^XJNIVEBSITY
Everywhere to-day is the Illustrator (artist he may not
always be), for never was illustration so marketable as
now ; and the correspondence -editors of the Sunday
papers have at length found a new outlet for the
superfluous energies of their eager querists in advising
them to " go in '* for black and white : as one might
advise an applicant to adventure upon a commercial
enterprise of large issues and great risks before the
amount of his capital (if any) had been ascertained.
It is so very easy to make black marks upon white
cardboard, is it not ? and not particularly difficult to
seize upon the egregious mannerisms of the accepted
purveyors of "the picturesque" — that cliche phrase,
battered nowadays out of all real meaning.
But for really serious art — personal, aggressive,
definite and instructed — one requires something more
a
Digitized
by Google
VI PREFACE.
than a penchant, or the stimulating impulsion of an
empty pocket, or even the illusory magnetism of the
vie bohime of the lady-novelist, whose artists still wear
velvet coats and aureoles of auburn hair, and marry
the inevitable heiress in the third volume. Not that
one really wishes to be one of those creatures, for the
lady-novelists* love-lorn embryonic Michael Angelos are
generally great cads ; but this by the way !
What is wanted in the aspirant is the vocation : the
feeling for beauty of line and for decoration, and the
powers both of idealizing and of selection. Pen-draw-
ing and allied methods are the chiefest means of
illustration at this day, and these qualities are essential
to their successful employ. Practitioners in pen-and-ink
are already numerous enough to give any new-comer
pause before he adds himself to their number, but
certainly the greater number of them are merely
journalists without sense of style; mannerists only of
a peculiarly vicious parasitic type.
** But,'' ask those correspondents, "does illustration
pay ? *' " Yes,*' says that omniscient person, the Corre-
spondence - Editor. Then those ♦ pixie - led wayfarers
through life, filled with an inordinate desire to draw,
Digitized
by Google
PREFACE. Vll
to paint, to translate Nature on to canvas or cardboard
(at a profit), set about the staining of fair paper, the
wasting of good ink, brushes, pens, and all the materials
with which the graphic arts are pursued, and lo! just
because the greater number of them set out, not with
the love of an art, but with the single idea of a paying
investment of time and labour — it does not pay !
Remuneration in their case is Latin for three farthings.
Publishers and editors, it is said, can now, with the
cheapness of modern methods of reproduction as against
the expense of wood -engraving, afford to pay artists
better because they pay engravers less. Perhaps they
can. But do they ?
' Pen-drawing in particular has., by reason of these
things, almost come to stand for exaggeration and a
shameless license — a convention that sees and renders
everything in a manner flamboyantly quaint. But this
vein is being worked down to the bed-rock : it has
plumbed its deepest depth, and everything now points
to a period of instructed sobriety where now the un-
taught abandon of these mannerists has rioted through
the pages of illustrated* magazines and newspapers to a
final disrepute. t /"^^Wf^^^^^^
(•UlTIVFRSlTTj
Digitized
by Google
via PREFACE.
Artists are now beginning to ask how they can
dissociate themselves from that merely manufacturing
army of frantic draughtsmen who never, or rarely, go
beyond the exercise of pure line-work ; and the widen
ing power of process gives them answer. Results
striking and unhackneyed are always to be obtained
to-day by those who are not hag-ridden by that purely
Philistine ideal of the clear sharp line.
These pages are written as a plea for something
else than the eternal round of uninspired work. They
contain suggestions and examples of results obtained in
striving to be at one with modern methods of repro-
duction, and perhaps I may be permitted to hope that
in this direction they may be of some service.
CHARLES G. HARPER.
Digitized
by Google
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY ... ... ... i
THE RISE OF AN ART ... 9
COMPARATIVE PROCESSES... ... ... ... 22
PAEER ... ... ... ... ... ... 78
PENS ... ... . . ... ... 92
INKS ... ... ... ... 96
THE MAKING OF A PEN-DRAWING ... ... 102
WASH DRAWINGS ... 121
STYLES AND MANNER ... ... ... 135
PAINTERS' PEN-DRAWINGS ... ... ... 154
Digitized
by Google
WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
ENGLISH PEN ARTISTS OF TO-DAY: Examples of
their work, with some Criticisms and Appreciations. Super royal
4to, £s ss. net.
THE BRIGHTON ROAD: Old Times and New on a Classic
Highway. With 95 Illustrations by the Author and from old
prints. Demy 8vo, 16^".
FROM PADDINGTON TO PENZANCE: The Record of
a Summer Tramp. With 105 Illustrations by the Author. Demy
8vo, 16s,
%
Digitized
by Google
Frontispiece
Vignette on Title
Kensington Palace. Photogravure .
The Hall, Barnard's Inn
A Window, Chepstow Castle
On Whatman's **Not" Paper ...
From a Drawing on Allonge Paper
Bolt Head : A Misty Day. Bitumen process
Bolt Head : A Misty Day. Swelled gelatine process
A Note at Gorran. Bitumen process ...
A Note at Gorran. Swelled gelatine process
Charlwood. Swelled gelatine process
Charlwood. Reproduced by Chefdeville
View from the Tower Bridge Works.
View from the Tower Bridge Works,
Sky revised by hand-work
Kensington Palace
Snodgrass Farm ...
Sunset, Black Rock ...
Drawing in Diluted Inks, reproduced by Gillot
Chepstow Castle
Clifford's Inn: a Foggy Night
Pencil and Pen and Ink Drawing reproduced by Half
TONE Process
31
Bitumen process
Bitumen process.
25
29
31
32
38
39
43
43
45
45
48
49
51
53
55
57
61
65
68
Digitized
by Google
Xll LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
The Village Street, Tintern. Night ... ... 70
Leebotwood ... ... ... ... ... ... 71
Examples of Day's Shading Mediums ... ... 75,76
Churchyard Cross, Raglan ... ... ... ... 76
Canvas-grain Clay-board ... ... ... ... 84
Plain Diagonal Grain ... ... ... ... 85
Plain Perpendicular Grain ... ... ... 85
Drawing in Pencil on White Aquatint Grain Clay-board 86
Black Aquatint Clay-board and Two Stages of Drawing 87
Black Diagonal-lined Clay-board and Two Stages of
Drawing ... ... ... ... ... ... 87
Black Perpendicular-lined Clay-board and Two Stages of
Drawing ... ... ... ... ... 88
Venetian FIite on the Seine, with the Trocadero illumi-
nated ... ... ... ... ... ... 89
The Gatehouse, Moynes Court ... ... ... no
Portrait Sketches ... ... ... ... 118, 119
The Houses of Parliament at Night, from the River 122
Victoria Embankment near Blackfriars Bridge : a Foggy
Night ... ... ... ... ... ... 123
CoRFE Railway Station ... ... ... ... 125
The Ambulatory, Dore Abbey ... ... ... ... 127
Moonlight: Confluence of the Severn and the Wye 131
Diagram showing Method of reducing Drawings for
Reproduction ... ... ... ... 133
Painter's Pen-drawing— Pasturage, by Mr. Alfred Hartley 155
„ „ Portrait, by Mr. Bonnat ... 156
Towing Path, Abingdon, by Mr. David Murray ... 158
A Portrait from a Drawing by Mr. T. Blake Wirgman 159
Finis ... ... ... ... ... ... i6r
Digitized
by Google
[trWIVERSITT;
A PRACTICAL HANDBOOK
OF
DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
INTRODUCTORY.
Pen-drawing is the most spontaneous of the arts, and
amongst the applied crafts the most modern. The pro-
fessional pen-draughtsman was unknown but a few years
since; fifteen years ago, or thereabouts, he was an
obscure individual, working at a poorly considered
craft, and handling was so seldom thought of that
the illustrator who could draw passably well was rarely
troubled by his publisher on the score of technique.
For that which had deserved the name of technique
was dead, so far as illustration was concerned, and
*' process," which was presently to vivify it, was, although
born already, but yet a sickly child. To-day the illus-
trators are numerous beyond computation, and the name
^^ B
Digitized
by Google
DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
of those who are impelled to the spoiling of good paper
and the wasting of much ink is indeed legion.
For uncounted years before the invention of photo-
mechanical methods of engraving, there had been
practised a method of drawing with the pen, which
formed a pretty pastime wherewith to fleet the idle
hours of the gentlemanly amateur, and this was, for no
discoverable reason, called '' etching."
It is needless at this time to go into the derivatives
of that word, with the object of proving that the verb
'' to etch " means something very different from drawing
in ink with a pen ; it should have, long since, been
demonstrated to everybody's satisfaction that etching
is the art of drawing on metal with a, point, and of
biting in that drawing with acids. But the manu-
facturers of pens long fostered the fallacy by selling
so-called etching-pens : probably they do so even now.
By whom pen-drawings were first called etchings
none can say^. Certainly the two arts have little or
nothing in common : the terms are not interchangeable.
Etching has its own especial characteristics, which may,
to an extent, be imitated with the pen, but the quality
and direction of line produced by a rigid steel point on
Digitized
by Google
INTRODUCTORY,
metal are entirely different from the lines drawn with
a flexible nib upon paper. The line produced by an
etching needle has a uniform thickness, but with the
needle you can work in any imaginable direction upon
the copper plate. With a nib upon paper, ^ line vary-
ing in thickness with the pressure of the hand results,
but there is not that entirely free use of the hand as
with the etching point : you cannot with entire freedom
draw from and toward yourself.
The greatest exponents of pen-drawing have not
entirely conquered the normal inability of the pen to
express the . infinite delightful waywardnesses of the
etching-point. Again, the etched line is only less sharp
than the line made by the graver upon wood ; the line
drawn with the pen upon the smoothest surface is
ragged, viewed under a magnifying glass. This, of
course, is not a plea for a clean line in penwork — that
is only the ideal of commercial draughtsmanship — but
the man who can produce such a line with the pen at
will, who can overcome the tendency to inflexible lines,
has risen victorious over the stubbornness of a material.
The sketch-books, gilt-lettered and india-rubber
banded, of the bread-and-butter miss, and what one
Digitized
by Google
DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
may be allowed, perhaps, to term the " pre-process "
amateur generally, give no hint of handling, no foretaste
of technique. They are barren of aught save ill-
registered facts, and afford no pleasure to the eye, which
is the end, the sensuous end, of all art. Rather did
these artless folk almost invariably seek to adventure
beyond the province of the pen by strokes infinitely
little and microscopic, so that they might haply deceive
the eye by similarity to wood engravings or steel prints.
But in those days pen-drawing was only a pursuit;
to-day it is a living art. Now, an art is not merely a
storehouse of facts, nor a moral influence. If it was
of these things, then the photographic camera would be
all-powerful, and all that would be left to do with the
hands would be the production of devotional pictures ;
and of those who produced them the best artist would
infallibly be him with a character the most noted for
piety. Art, to the contrary, is entirely independent of
subject or morals. It is not sociology, nor ever shall
be ; and those who practise an art might be the veriest
pariahs, and yet their works rank technically, artistically^
among the best. Art is handling in excelsis, and its
results lie properly in the pride of the eye and the
Digitized
by Google
INTRODUCTORY,
satisfaction of the aesthetic sense, though Mr. Ruskin
would have it otherwise.
Is this the lashing of a dead horse, or thrice slaying
the slain ? No, I think not. The moral and literary
fallacies remain. Open an art exhibition and give your
exhibits technical, not subject titles, and you shall ^ ]a^k^
hear a mighty howl, I promise you. Mr. Hamerton/';-^J.^ ; ^
too, has recently found grudging occasion to say that, -^
for artists, **it does not appear that a literary education "^^ - ^' -
would be necessary in all cases." Whenever was it
necessary.^ But then Mr. Hamerton is himself one
of those philosophic writers of a winning literary turn
who can practise an art in by no means a distinguished
way, but who write dogma by the yard and fumble over
every illustration of their precepts. His Drawing and
Engraving — a reprint from his Encyclopedia Britannica
article — is worse than useless to the student of illus-
tration, and especially of pen-drawing, because Mr.
Hamerton has long been left behind the times. He
knows little of the admirable modern methods of
reproducing line-work, but gives us etymologies of
drawing and historical dissertations on engraving, which
we do not want. Of such antiquated matter are even
Digitized
by Google
DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
the current editions of encyclopaedias fashioned. The
fact is, the bulk of art criticism is written by men who
can only string platitudes and stale studio slang together,
without beginning to understand principles. The
appalling journalese of much '* art criticism '' is
hopelessly out of date ; the slang of a half-forgotten
atelier is the lingo of would-be criticism to-day.
It seems strange that a man who can write pretty
vers de socUt^, or another who writes essays (essays,
truly, in the philological sense), should for such acquire-
ments be amongst those to whom is delegated the
criticism of art in painting, drawing, or engraving ; but
so it is. No one who has not surmounted the diffi-
culties of a medium can truly appreciate technique in
it, whether that medium be words, or paint, or ink. No
one, for instance, would give a painter or a pen-artist
the chance to review a poet's new volume of poems.
You would not send a plumber to pronounce upon a
baker's method of kneading his dough. No; but an
ordinary reporter is judged capable of criticizing a
gallery of pictures. You cannot get much artistic
change out of his report, nor from the articles on art
written by a man whose only claim to the standing of
Digitized
by Google
''art critic " is the possession of a second-class certificate
in drawing from the Science and Art Department.
But of such stuff are the neurotic Neros of the literary
" art critique " fashioned, and equally unauthorized by
works are the lectures on illustration with which the
ingenious Mr. Blackburn at decent intervals tickles
suburban audiences or the amiable dilettante of the
Society of Arts into the fallacious belief that they know
all about it, "which," to quote the Euclidian formula, ''is
absurd/' Indeed, not even the most industrious, the
best-informed, nor the most catholic-minded man could
ever lecture, or write articles, or publish an illustrated
critical work upon illustration which should show an
approximation to completeness in its examples of styles
and methods^ The thing has been attempted, but will
never be done, because the quantity of work — even
good work — that has been produced is so vast, the
styles so varied. The great storehouses of the best
pen-work are the magazines, and from them the eclectic
will gather a rich harvest. The Century and Harpers
are now the chief of these. The Magazine of Art
and the Portfolio, which were used to be filled with
good original work, are now busied in providing such
Digitized
by Google
8 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
rdchauffds as photographic blocks from paintings old
and new, but chiefly old, because they cost nothing for
copyright. As for newspaper work, the Daily Graphic
is creating a school of its own, which does far better
work than ever its New York namesake (now defunct)
ever printed.
Some beautiful and most suggestive pen-drawings
are to be found in the earlier numbers of L Art and
many Parisian publications, such as the Courier
FranpaiSy Vie Moderne, Paris Illustr^, and La Petit
Journal pour Rire. Many of the Salon catalogues, too,
contain admirable examples.
Digitized
by Google
THE RISE OF AN ART.
Photo-mechanical processes of reproduction were
invented by men who sought, not to create an art, not
to help art in any way, but only to cheapen the cost
of reproduction. '* Line " processes — that is to say,
processes for the reproduction of pure line — though not
the first invented amongst modern methods, were the
first to come into a state of practical utility; though
even then their results were so crude that the artists
whom necessity led to draw for them sank at once to
a deeper depth than ever they had sounded when the
faC'Simile wood-cutter held them in bondage. They
became the slaves of mechanical limitations and chemical
formulae, which was a worse condition than having been
henchmen of a craftsman. So far as the aesthetic sense
is concerned, the process illustration of previous date
to (say) 1880 might all be destroyed and no harm done,
save, perhaps, the loss of much evidence of a docu-
Digitized
by Google
lO DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
mentary character toward the history of early days of
processes.
There have been two great factors in their gradual
perfection — competition with the wood-engravers and of
rival process firms one with another, and, perhaps more
important still, the independency of a few artists who
have found methods of drawing with the pen, and have
followed them despite the temporary limitations of the
process-man. The workmen have ** drawn for process "
in the worst and most commercial sense of the term ;
they have set down their lines after the hard-and-fast
rules which were formulated for their guidance. For
years after the invention of zincography, artists who
were induced to make drawings for the new methods
of engraving worked in a dull round of routine ; for
in those days the process-man was not less, but more,
tyrannical than his predecessor, the wood-engraver ; his
yoke was, for a time, harder to bear.
One was enjoined to make drawings with only the
blackest of Indian ink, upon Bristol-board, the thickest
and smoothest and whitest that could be obtained, and
upon none other. It was impressed upon the draughts-
man that he should draw lines thick and wide apart and
Digitized
by Google
THE RISE OF AN ART, T I
firm, and that his drawings should be made with a view
to, preferably, a reduction in scale of one-third. Also
that by no means should his lines run together by any
chance, except in the matter of a coarse and obvious
cross-hatch. And so, by reason of these things, the
pen-work of that time is become dreadful to look upon
at this. day. The man who then drew with a view to
reproduction squirmed on the very edge of his chair,
and with compressed lips, and his heart in his mouth,
drew upon his Bristol-board slowly and carefully, and
with so heavy a hand, that presently his wrist ached
consumedly, and his drawing became stilted in the
extreme. Not yet was pen-drawing a profession, for
few men had learned these formulae; and the zinco-
graphy of that time made miserable all them that were
translated by it into something appreciably different
from their original work. Illustration, although already
sensibly increased in volume, was artistically at the
lowest ebb. It was a manufacture, an industry; but
scarcely a profession, and most certainly it had not yet
become an art.
When technique in drawing for process began to
appear as an individual techniaii£.jQnnosed to the old
Digitized
by Google
12 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
/aC'Stmile wood-engraving needs, it was a handling en-
tirely abominable and inartistic. If old-time drawing
for the wood-engravers was pursued in grooves of con-
vention, working for the zincographer proceeded in ruts.
There have never been, before or since, such horribly
uninspired things produced as in the first years of pro-
cess-work in these islands. Such dull, scratchy, spotty,
wiry-looking prints resulted : they were, as now, pro-
duced in zinc, and they proclaimed it unmistakably.
Had not these new methods been about one- fifth the
cost of wood-engraving, they would have had no chance
whatever. But we are a commercial and an inartistic
. people, and publishers, careless of appearance, welcomed
any results that gave them a typographic block at a fifth
of its former cost.
Process, in its beginnings, was not a promising
method of reproduction. Men saw scarcely anything
in it save cheap (and nasty) ways of multiplying
diagrams, and the bald and generally artless elevations
of new buildings issued from architects' offices. But in
course of time, better blocks, with practice, became
possible, and freer use of the pen was obtained ; although
at every unhackneyed stroke the process-man shrieked
Digitized
by Google
THE RISE OF AN ART. 1 3
disaster. It is incalculable how much time has been
wasted, how many careers set back, by obedience to the
hard-and-fast rules laid down for the guidance of artists
by the process-people of years since. To those artists
who, with an artistic recklessness of results entirely
admirable and praiseworthy, set down their work as
they pleased, we owe, more than to any others, the
progress of process ; by their immediate martyrdom was
our eventual salvation earned. And in the sure and
certain hope of a reproduction really and XxvXy facsimile^
the draughtsman in the medium of pen-and-ink is to-day
become a technician of a peculiar subtlety.
To-day, with the exercise of knowledge and dis-
crimination, drawings the most difficult of reproduction
may be rendered faithfully ; it is a matter only of choice
of processes. But in the mass of reproduction at this
time, this knowledge, this discrimination, are often seen
to be lacking. It is a matter of commerce, of course,
for a publisher, an editor, to send off originals in bulk
to one firm, and to await from one source the resulting
blocks. But unknowing, or reckless of their individual
merits and needs, our typical editor has thus consigned
some drawings to an unkind fate. There are many
Digitized
by Google
14 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
processes even for the reproduction of line, and draw-
ings of varying characteristics are better reproduced by
different methods ; they should each be sent for repro-
duction on its own merits.
It was in 1884 that there began to arise quite a
number of original styles in pen-work, and then this
new profession was by way of becoming an art. You
will not find any English-printed book or magazine
before this date showing a sign of this new art, but now
it arose suddenly, and at once became an irresponsible,
unreasoning welter of ill-considered mannerisms. Ever
since 1884, until within the last year or two, pen-
draughtsmen have rioted through every conceivable and
inconceivable vagary of manner. The artists who by
force of artistry and character have helped to spur on
the process-man against his will, and have worked with
little or no heed to the shortcomings of his science, have
freed the hands of a dreadful rabble that has revelled
merely in eccentricity. Thus has liberty for a space
meant a licence so wild that to-day it has become quite
refreshing to turn back to the sobriety of the old
illustrators of from thirty to forty years ago, who drew
for xh^/aC'Stmile wood-engraver.
Digitized
by Google
THE RISE OF AN AR
From 1857, through the *6o's, and on to 1875, when
it finally shredded out, there existed a fine convention
in drawing for illustration and the wood-engraver.
Among the foremost exponents of it were Millais,
Sandys, Charles Green, Robert Barnes, Simeon Solo-
mon, Mahony, J. D, Watson, and J. D. Linton. Pinwell
and Fred Walker, too, produced excellent work in this
manner, before they untimely died.
The Sunday Magazine, Once a Week, Good Words,
Cornhilly the first two years of the Graphic, and, where
the drawings have not been drawn down to their
humourous legends, the volumes of Punch during this
period, are a veritable storehouse of beautiful examples
of this peculiarly English school. It was a convention
that grew out of the wood- engraver s imposed limits,
and they became transcended by the art of the young
artists of that day.
There is a certain sweetness and grace in those old
illustrations that seems to increase with the widening of
that gulf between our day and the day of their pro-
duction. It is not for the sake of their draughtsmanship
alone (though that is excellent), but chiefly for their
technical qualities, and their fine character-drawing, that
Digitized
by Google
1 6 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION,
those monumental achievements in illustration appeal so
strongly to the artistic eye to-day. We have been
accustomed during these last years to the stress
of mannerism, the bravura treatment of imported
art, bringing with it strange atmospheres which
have nothing in common with our duller skies, and,
truth to tell, we want a change. Now, we might do
much worse than hark back to the '60' s, and study
the peculiar style brought about by the needs of the
wood-engraver, but transformed into an admirable
school by men who wrought their trammels into a
convention so great that it cannot fail, some day, to
be revived.
It is greatly to be deplored that we have not left
to us the original drawings of that time and these
men. In the majority of cases, and through a long
series of years, the drawings from which th^se faC'Simile
wood-engravings were made were drawn by the
artists on the wood block, and engraved, so that we
have left to us only the more or less successful
engraver's imitation of the artists' original line-
work. But when these blocks were the work of the
Dalziels, or of Swain, we may generally take them as
Digitized
by Google
THE RISE OF AN ART. 1 7
a close approximation to the original drawing. Pen
and pencil both were used upon the wood blocks : some
of these are to be seen at the South Kensington
Museum, with the original drawings upon them still
uncut, photography having in the mean while become
applied to the use of transferring a drawing from paper
to the wood surface.
Unless you have practised etching on copper, in
which you have to draw upon the plate in reverse, you
can have little idea of the relief experienced by the
artists of thirty years ago, when the necessity for drawing
in reverse upon the wood was obviated.
Now, I am not going to say that with pen and ink
and process-reproduction you could obtain the sweetness
of the wood-engraved line, but something of it should be
possible, and the dignified, almost classic, reserve and
repose of this style of draughtsmanship could be, in
great measure, brought back to help assuage the worry
of the ultra-clever pen-work of to-day, and to form a
grateful relief from that peculiarly modern vice in
illustration, of " making a hole in the page."
The great difficulty that would lie in the way of
such a revival would be that those who would attempt
Digitized
by Google
1 8 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
it would need to be good draughtsmen ; and of these
there are not many. No tricks nor flashy treatment
hid bad drawing in this technique, as in much of the
slap-dashiness of to-day. And not only would sound
draughtsmanship be essential, but also characterization
of a peculiarly well-seen and graphic description. The
illustrator of a generation ago worked under tremendous
disadvantages. " Phiz " etched his inimitable illustra-
tions of Dickens upon steel with all the attendant
drawbacks of working in reverse, yet he would be a
bold man or reckless who should decry him. He w^as,
at his best, greater beyond comparison than the Cruick-
shank — George, in the forefront of that artistic trinity —
and he reached his highest point in the delightful
composition of "Captain Cuttle consoles his Friend,"
in Dombey and Son. Composition and characterization
are beyond anything done before or since. It is
distinctly, obviously, great, and it fits the author and
his story like — like a glove. One cannot find a newer
and better simile than that for good fitting. And (not
to criticize modern work severely because it is modern)
the greater bulk of illustration to-day fits the stories
it professes to elucidate like a Strand tailor.
Digitized
by Google
THE RISE OF AN ART, 1 9
There are facilities now for buying electrotypes from
magazines and illustrated periodicals, by which engrav-
ings that have already served one turn in illustrating
a story can be purchased, to do duty again in illus-
trating another; and this is a practice very widely
prevalent to-day. And why can this be so readily
done ? The answer is near to seek. It is because
illustration is become so characterless that it is so
readily interchangeable. Perhaps it may be sought to
lay the blame upon the author; and certainly there is
not at this time so ready a field for character-drawing
as Dickens presented. But I have not seen any
illustrations to Mr. Hardy's tales, nor to Mr. Steven-
son's, that realize the excellently well -shown types in
their works.
If you should chance to see any early volumes (say
from 1859 to 1863) of Once a Week for sale, secure
them : they should be the cherished possessions of every
black and white artist. After this date their quality
fell off. Charles Keene contributed to Once a Week
some of his best work, and the Mr. Millais of that date
in line is more interesting than the Sir John Millais
of to-day in paint. There - is, in especial, a beautiful
Digitized
by Google
20 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
drawing by him, an illustration to the Grandmother's
Apology y in the volume for 1859, page 40. But,
frankly, it is a mistake to instance one illustration where
so very many are monumental productions. Fred
Walker contributed many exquisite drawings; Mr.
Whistler, few enough to make us ardently wish there
were more ; and the same may be said of Mr. Sandys'
decorative work — his Rosamond, Queen of the Lombards,
his Vet once more let the Organ play, his King Warwulf
Harald Harfagr, or The Old CJiartist. These things
are a delight : the artist's work so insistently good, the
quality of the engraver's lines so wonderfully fine.
For all the talk and pother about illustration, there
is nothing to-day that cofhes within miles of the work
done in, say, 1 862-1 863 for Once a Week. It would
be difficult to over-praise or to over-estimate the value
of this fine period. It was the period of the abominable
crinoline ; but even that hideous fashion was trans-
figured by the artistry of these men. . That is evident in
the beautiful drawing, If contributed by Sandys to the
Argosy for 1863, in which the grandly flowing lines of
the dress show what may be done with the most un-
promising material.
Digitized
by Google
THE RISE OF AN ART. 21
The most interesting drawings in the Cornhill
Magazine range from 1863 to 1867. Especially note-
worthy are the illustrations by Fred Walker —
Maladetta, May, 1863, page 621, and Out of the Valley
of the Shadow, January, 1867, page 75. If you compare
the first of these with the little pen -drawing by Charles
Green, reproduced by process in Harper s Magazine,
May, 1 89 1, page 894, entitled, *'Give me those letters,"
you will see how Mr. Green's hand has retained the
old technique he and his brother illustrators learnt in
drawing for the wood-engraver, and you will observe
how well that old handling looks, and how admirably
it reproduces in the process-work of to-day. Two other
most successful wood blocks from the Cornhill Magazine
may be noted — Mother's GuineaSy by Charles Keene,
July, 1864, and Molly's New Bonnet, August, 1864,
by Mr. Du Maurier.
(university)
Digitized
by Google
COMPARATIVE PROCESSES.
Processes, at first chiefly of the heliogravure or
photogravure variety — processes, that is to say, of the
intaglio or plate-printing description, printed in the same
way as etchings and mezzotints, from dots and lines
sunken in a metal plate instead of standing out in relief
— date back almost to the invention of photography in
1834 ; and all modern processes of reproducing drawings
have a photographic basis. Even at that time it was
demonstrated that a glass negative could be used to
reproduce the photographic image as an etched plate
that would print in the manner of a mezzotint. Mr.
H. Fox-Talbot, to whom belongs,, equally with
Daguerre, the invention of photography, was the first
to show this. He devised an etched silver plate that
reproduced a photograph direct.
Photo-relief, or type-printing, blocks date from such
Digitized
by Google
COMPARATIVE PROCESSES, 23
comparatively recent times as i860, when the Photo-
graphic Journal showed an illustration printed from a
block by the Pretsch process.
At this present time there are three methods of
primary importance for the reproduction of line
drawings —
The swelled gelatine process,
The albumen process,
The bitumen process.
The first of these three processes is the most expensive,
and it has not so great a vogue as the less costly
methods, which are employed for the illustration of
journals or publications that do not rely chiefly upon
the excellence of their work. It is employed almost
exclusively by Messrs. A. and C. Dawson in this
country, and it is in all essentials identical with the
old Pretsch process that first saw the light thirty-three
years ago.
Acids do not enter into the practice of it at all.
The procedure is briefly thus : A good dense negative
is taken of the drawing to be reproduced to the size
required. The glass plate is then placed in perfect
contact with gelatine sensitized by an admixture of
Digitized
by Google
24 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION,
bichromate of potassium to the action of light. Placed
in water, the gelatine thus printed upon from the
negative, swells, excepting those portions that have
received the image of the reduced drawing. These are
now become sunken, and form a suitable matrix for
electrotyping into. Copper is then deposited by electro-
deposition. The copper skin receives a backing of
type-metal, and is mounted on wood to the height of
type, and the block, ready for printing, is completed.
This process gives peculiar advantages in the
reproduction of pen-drawings made with greyed or
diluted inks. The photographic negative reproduces,
of course, the varying intensities of such work with the
most absolute accuracy, and they are repeated, with
scarcely less fidelity, by the gelatine matrix. Pencil
marks and pen-drawings with a slight admixture of
pencil come excellently well by this method.
Every pen-draughtsman who sketches from nature
knows how, in re-drawing from his pencil sketches, the
feeling and sympathy of his work are lost, wholly or
in part ; but if the finished pen-drawing is made over
the original pencil sketch and the pencilling retained,
the effect is generally a revelation. It is in these
Digitized
by Google
4f X 7h
THE HALL, HARNARDS INN.
Drawinc;^ in pale Indian ink on HP Whatman paper. Drawn ivithout kmnvledge of Process and
reproduced by the sxve lied gelatine vtctkoa.
Digitized
by Google
Digitized
by Google
COMPARATIVE PROCESSES. 2 J
cases that the swelled gelatine process gives the best
results.
This example {The Hall, Barnard's Inn) of a pen-
drawing not made for reproduction by process was
made years ago. Now reproduced, it shows that almost
everything is possible to mechanical reproduction to-day.
This drawing, worked upon with never a thought or
idea or knowledge of process, comes every whit as well
as if it had been drawn scrupulously to that end. It
is all pen- work, save the outline around it and the
signature, and they are in black chalk. The reduction
from the original is only three-quarters of an inch across,
and the reproduction is in every respect exact. Of
course it is only swelled gelatine that could perform this
feat ; but by that process it is clear that you get results
at once sympathetic and faithful, without the necessity
of caring overmuch about the purely mechanical
drudgery of learning a convention in pen and ink that
shall be suitable for the etched processes. That
convention has been wrought — it may not be said by
tears and blood, but certainly with prodigious labour —
by the masters of the art of pen-drawing into something
artistic and pleasing to the eye, while it satisfies
Digitized
by Google
2$ DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
photographic and chemical needs. But here is a
process that demands no previous training in drawing
for reproduction, and leaves the artist unfettered. True,
it opens a vista of easy reproduction to the amateur,
which is a thing terrible to think upon ; but, on the
other hand, to it we owe some delightful reproductions
of ** painters*" pen-drawings that make the earlier
numbers of the illustrated exhibition catalogues worth
having.
The albumen process is perhaps the more widely
used of the three. By it the vast majority of the blocks
used in journalistic work are made. It is credibly
reported that one firm alone delivers annually sixty-
three thousand blocks made by this process, which (it
Avill thus be seen) is particularly suited to reproduction
of the most instant and straightaway nature. It is also
the cheapest method of reproduction, which goes far
toward explaining that gigantic output just quoted.
But, on the other hand, the albumen process in the
^ hands of an artist in reproduction (as, for instance, M.
Chefdeville) is capable of the most sympathetic results.
It gives a softer, more velvety line than one would
think possible, a line of a different character entirely
Digitized
by Google
'':r'-
4jx8.
A WINDOW, CHEPSTOW CASTLK.
Drawing' in Contd crayon on rough faper..
Digitized
by Google
DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
from the clear, cold, sharp, and formal line characteristic
of processes in which bitumen is used. These two
methods (albumen and bitumen) are incapable of repro-
ducing scarcely anything in yJ^r-^/w^7^ but pure line work ;
pencil marks or greyed ink are either omitted or exag-
gerated to extremity, and they can only be corrected by
the subsequent use of the graver upon the block. But
black chalk or Cont^ crayon used upon slightly granu-
lated drawing-papers, either by themselves or mixed
with pen-work, come readily enough and help greatly to
reinforce a sketch. This sketch of A WindoWy Chepstow
Castlcy was made with a Cont6 crayon. Unfortunately,
these materials smear very easily, and have to be fixed
before they can be trusted to the photo-engraver with
perfect safety. Drawings made in this way may be
fixed with a solution composed of gum mastic and
methylated spirits of wine : one part of the former to
seven parts of the latter. This fixing solution is best
applied with a spray apparatus, as sold by chemists.
But better than crayons, chalks, or charcoals are the
lithographic chalks now coming somewhat into vogue.
They have the one inestimable advantage of fixity, and
cannot be readily smeared, even with intent. They are
Digitized
by Google
COMPARATIVE PROCESSES.
not fit for use upon smooth Bristol-board or glazed
paper, but find their best mediums in HP and
ON WHATMAN'S " NOT " PAPER (6J X 4^).
"not" makes of drawing-paper, and in the grained
'* scratch-out " cardboards, of which more hereafter.
They give greater depth of colour than lead pencil, and
ON ALLONG^ PAPER, RIGHT SIDE (6 J X 4^).
reproduce more surely ; and the drawings worked up
with them readily stand as much reduction as an ordinary
Digitized
by Google
32
DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
pen-drawing. The No. i Lemercier is the best
variety of lithographic chalks for this admixture ; it is
harder than others, and can be better sharpened to a
fine point. For detail it is to be used very sparingly or
not at all, because it is incapable of producing a delicate
line ; but for giving force, for instance, to a drawing
of crumbling walls, or to an impressionist sketch of land-
scape, it is invaluable. The effects produced by working
with a No. i Lemercier litho-chalk are shown here.
-riT-SUl
^>-t™fe
i^.>
:. U^
*>'
.,. -«:^|
i^^A
inMll^y^ ^-
^mj^-i
\\ \ ,
'''¥-§!^m^^%
i- ^^M
W^^L
< '^■'^'^^^^^
^^a^fe^^^S
•-?^^^
^^^^^g
' "^* '"''■^'^
^^^s^^p^s
^^^^y^lj^y--^
.''''■•■. -' •.
^-^;'"^
' - -' — "
fe'T^
^&^r^^l
FROM THE DRAWING (4J X 2^) ON ALLONGfi PAPER
(RIGHT SIDE).
The first example was drawn upon Whatman's **not''
paper, which gives a fine, bold granulation. The two
remaining examples are from sketches on Allonge
paper, a fine-grained charcoal paper of French make.
It is also worth knowing that a good grained draw-
ing may be made with litho-chalk, by taking a piece of
dull-surfaced paper, like the kind generally used for
Digitized
by Google
COMPARATIVE PROCESSES. 33
type-writing purposes, pinning it tightly upon glass- or
sand-paper and then working upon it, keeping it always
in contact with the rough sand-paper underneath. A
canvas-grain may be obtained by using the cover of a
canvas-bound book in the same way.
Both the albumen and the* bitumen processes areN^
practised with the aid of acids upon zinc. In the first/
named the zinc plate is coated with a ground compo^a
of a solution of white of egg and bichromate of ammonia\
soluble in cold water. A reversed photographic nega-
tive is taken of the drawing and placed in contact with
the prepared zinc plate in a specially constructed print-
ing-frame. When the drawing is sufficiently printed
upon this albumen surface, the plate is rolled over with
a roller charged with printing-ink thinned down with
turpentine, and then, when this inking has been com-
pleted, the plate is carefully rubbed in cold water until
the inked albumen has been rubbed off it, excepting
those parts where the drawing appears. The lines
composing the drawing remain fixed upon the plate, the
peculiar property of the sensitized albumen rendering
the lines that have been exposed to the action of
light insoluble. The zinc plate is then dried and
D
Digitized
by Google
34 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
Sponged with gum ; dried again, and then the coating of
gum washed off, and then inked again. The plate, now
thoroughly prepared, is placed in the first etching bath,
a rocking vessel filled with much-diluted nitric acid.
There are generally three etchings performed upon a
zinc block, each successfve bath being of progressively
stronger acid ; and between these baths the plate is
gummed, and powdered with resin, and warmed over a
gas flame until the printing-ink and the half-melted resin
run down the sides of the lines already partly etched ;
the object of these careful stages being to prevent what
is technically termed " under-etching " — that is to say,
the production of a relief line, whose section would be
thus : \7 instead of /\. The result in the printing of
an under-etched block would be that the lines would
either break or wear down to nothingness, whereas a
block showing the second section would grow stronger
and the old lines thicker with prolonged use. The
section of a wood engraving is according to this second
diagram.
In the case of the bitumen process, the photograph
is taken as before, the negative placed upon the zinc
plate in the same way, and the image printed upon the
Digitized
by Google
COMPARATIVE PROCESSES. 35
bitumen. When this has been done, the plate is flooded
with turpentine, and all the bitumen dissolved away,
with the exception of that upon the image. The sub-
sequent proceedings are as in the case of the albumen
process, and need not be recounted.
It will be seen (if this outline can be followed) that
the bitumen process differs from the albumen only in
the composition of the ground (as an etcher would term
it), but the quality of line is very different. The
zinc plates used are cut from polished sheets of the
metal, from one-sixteenth to one-eighth of an inch in
thickness.
A well-etched block should feel sharp yet smooth to
the thumb and fingers, as if it were cut A badly etched
or over-etched block has an altogether different feel :
scratchy, and repulsive to the touch. Frequently it
happens that by carelessness or mischance the process-
man will over-etch a block ; that is to say, he will allow
it to remain in the acid-bath a minute or so too long,
so that the upstanding lines become partly eaten away
by the fluid. The result, when printed, is a wretched
ghost of the original drawing. An over-etched block,
or a good block in which the lines appear too thin and
Digitized
by Google
36 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
the reproduction in consequence weak, can be remedied
in degree by being rubbed down with oilstone. This, if
the lines are not under-etched, thickens the upstanding
metal and produces a heavier print. But some of the
smaller process firms have an ingenious, if none too
honest, practice of pulling a proof from the unetched plate,
and sending it along with the defective block. This can
readily be done by inking up the image with a roller
before printing, and then passing the thin plate of
metal through a lithographic press, or through a transfer
press, such as is to be found in every process establish-
ment. Of course the print thus secured is a perfect
replica in little of the original drawing, and looks emi-
nently satisfactory. One can generally identify these
proofs before etching by their backs, which have, of
course, not the slightest marks of the pressure usually to
be discerned upon even the most carefully prepared
proofs of finished blocks. The surface of a zinc block
sometimes becomes oxidized by the acid used in etching
not having been thoroughly washed off. This may
occur at once if the acid is strong, and then it generally
happens that the block is irretrievably ruined; but if
oxidation occurs after some time, it is generally super-
Digitized
by Google
Digitized
by Google
Digitized
by Google
5
O
-^
^
3
!
I
I
1
X
Digitized
by Google
[VNlVERSlTrj
Digitized
by Google
COMPARATIVE PROCESSES. 4 1
ficial, and can be rubbed down. The process of oxida-
tion begins with an efflorescence, which may be best
rubbed down with a thick stick of charcoal, broken
across the grain. But zinc blocks are frequently ruined
by carelessness in the printing-office after printing.
When the printing has been done it is customary to
clean type and blocks from the printing-ink by scrubbing
them with a brush dipped in what printers call ** lye " —
that is, a solution of pearl-ash^ — which, although it does
not injure the leaden types, is apt to corrode the zinc of
which most process blocks are made, if they are not
carefully and immediately washed in water and dried.
A block with its surface destroyed in this manner prints
miserably, with a fuzzy appearance. The easiest way
of protecting blocks from becoming oxidized is to allow
the printing-ink to remain on them, or if you have none,
rub them over with tallow.
Examples will now be shown of the varying results
obtainable from the same drawings by different pro-
cesses.
The drawing representing a Misty Day at Bolt Head
was made upon common rough paper, such as is usually
found in sailors' log-books ; in fact, it was a log-book
Digitized
by Google
42% DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
the present writer used during the greater part of a tour
in Devon, nothing else being obtainable in those parts
save the cloth-bound, gold-lettered sketch-books whose
porterage convicts one at once of amateurishness. And
here let me say that a sailor's log-book, though decidedly
an unconventional medium for sketching in, seems to be
entirely admirable. The paper takes pencil excellently
well, and the faint blue parallel lines with which the
pages are ruled need bother no one ; they will not (being
blue) reproduce. To save the freshness bf the impres-
sion, the sketch was lightly finished in ink, and sent for
reproduction uncleaned. The illustration shows the
result. It is an example of the bitumen process, whose
original sin of exaggerating all the pencil marks which
it has been good enough to reproduce at all is partly
cloaked by the intervention of hand-work all over the
block. You can see how continually the graver has
been put through the lines to produce a greyness, yet
how unsatisfactory the result !
The drawing was now sent for reproduction by the
swelled gelatine process. The result is a much more
satisfactory block. Everything that the original con-
tained has been reproduced. The sullen blacknesses of
the pinnacled rocks are nothing extenuated, as they were
Digitized
by Google
Ptn atid pencil drawing, reproduced by bitumen process.
»3i X 9i» A NOTE AT GORRAN.
Pen andpetuil drawings reproduced by swelled gelatine process.
Digitized
by Google
44 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
in the first example, where they seem comparatively
insignificant, and the technical qualities of pen and pencil
are retained throughout, and can readily be identified.
The same remarks apply even more strongly to the
small blocks from the Note at Gorran.
But such a pure pen-drawing as that of Charlwood,
shown here in blocks by (i) Messrs. Dawson's swelled
gelatine process, and (2) by Mr. Chefdeville's sym-
pathetic handling of the albumen process, would have
come almost equally well by bitumen, or by an ordinary
practitioners treatment of albumen. It offered no
technical difficulties, and there is exceedingly little to
choose between these two blocks. Careful examination
would show that a very slight thickening of line had
taken place throughout the block by the gelatine method,
and this must ever be the distinguishing difference
between that process and those in which acids are used
to eat away the metal of the block — that the gelatine
renders at its best every jot and tittle of a drawing, and
would by the nature of the process rather exaggerate
than diminish ; and that in those processes in which
acids play a part, the process-man must be ever watchful
lest his zinc plate be " over-etched " — lest the upstanding
Digitized
by Google
Pen-draiving reproduced by swelled gelatine process.
8ix6i.
Pen-drawing reproduced by CJiefdeville,
Digitized
by Google
46 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
metal lines be eaten away to a scratchy travesty of the
original drawing. But you will see that although the
lines in the swelled gelatine Charlwood are appreciably
thicker than in its albumen fellow, yet the latter prints
darker. The explanation is in the metals of which the
two blocks are composed. Zinc prints more heavily
than copper.
It should not be forgotten that, to-day, hand- work
upon process-blocks is become very usual. To para-
phrase a well-worn political catch-phrase, the old methods
have been called in to redress the vagaries of the new :
the graver has been retained to correct the crudities of
the rocking-bath. To be less cryptic, the graver is used
nowadays to tone down the harsh and ragged edges of
the etched zinc. Here is an illustration that will convey
the idea to perfection. Here is, in this View from the
Tower Bridge Works^ a zincographic block, grounded
with bitumen and etched by the aid of acids. The
original drawing was made upon Bristol-board, with
Stephens' ebony stain, and an F nib of Mitchell's make.
The size of that drawing was twelve and a half inches
across ; the sky drawn in with much elaboration. A
first proof showed a sky harsh and wanting in aerial
Digitized
by Google
COMPARATIVE PROCESSES. 47
perspective. A graver was put through it, cutting up
the lines into dots, and thus putting the sky into proper
relation with the rest of the picture.
Another interesting and suggestive comparison is
between photogravure, or heliogravure, as it is some-
times called, and type-printing processes for the repro-
duction of line. The frontispiece to this volume is a
heliogravure plate by Dujardin, of Paris, from a pen-
drawing that offered no obstacles to adequate repro
duction by the bitumen process. In fact, you see it
here, reproduced in that way, and of the same size.
The copper intaglio plate is in every way superior to the
relief block, as might have been expected. The hardness
of the latter method gives way, in the heliogravure plate,
to a delightful softness, even when the plate is clean-
wiped and printed in as bald and artless a fashion as a
tradesman's business card ; but now it is printed with
care and with the retroussage that is generally the meed
of the etching, you could not have distinguished it from
an etching had you not been told its history.
The procedure in making a heliogravure is in this .
^ise : — A copper plate, similar to the kind used by \
etchers, receives a ground of bichromatized bitumen. . A
OF THE
[university^
Digitized
by Google
i
Digitized
by Google
Digitized
by Google
50 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
photograph is taken of the drawing to be reproduced,
and from the negative thus obtained a positive is made.
The positive, in reverse, is placed upon the grounded
plate and printed upon it. The bitumen which has been
printed upon by the action of light is thus rendered
wholly insoluble, and the image of the drawing remains
the only' soluble portion of the ground. The plate is
then treated with turpentine, and the soluble lines thus
dissolved. Follows then the ordinary etching pro-
cedure. This is a more simple and ready process than
the making of a relief block. It is, however, more
expensive to commission, but then expense never is
any criterion of original cost. The printing, though,
is a heavy item, because, equally with etchings or
mezzotints, it must be printed upon a copper-plate
)press, and this involves the cleaning and the re-inking
\ of the plate with every impression.
The subject which the present plate bears does not
show the utmost capabilities of the heliogravure. It
was chosen as a fair example to show the difference
between two methods without straining the limitations
of the relief block. But if •the drawing had been most
carefully graduated in intensity from the deepest black
Digitized
by Google
<
I
[UNIVERSITY'
California
Digitized
by Google
52 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
to the palest brown, the copper plate would have shown
everything with perfect ease. Large editions of these
plates are not to be printed without injury, because the
constant wiping of the soft copper wears down the
surface. But to obviate this defect a process of acierage
has been invented, by which a coating of iron is elec-
trically deposited upon the surface of the plate, rendering
it, practically, as durable as a steel engraving.
It is by experiments we learn to achieve distinction ;
by immediate failure that we rise to ultimate success ;
and ofttimes by pure chance that we discover in these
days some new trick of method by which process shall
do for the illustrator something it has not done before.
There is still, no doubt, in the memory of many, that
musty anecdote of the painter who, fumbling over the
proper rendering of foam, applied by some accident a
sponge to the wet paint, and lo ! there, by happy chance,
was the foam which had before been like nothing so
much as wool.
In the same way, I suppose, some draughtsman
discovered splatter- work. He may readily be imagined,
prior to this lucky chance, painfully stippling little dots
with his pen ; pin-points of ink stilted and formal in
Digitized
by Google
a;
I
Digitized
by Google
54 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
effect when compared with the peculiarly informal con-
course of spots produced by taking a small, stiff-bristled
brush (say a toothbrush), inking it, and then, holding the
bristles downwards and inclining toward the drawing,
more or less vigorously stroking the inky bristles
towards one with a match-stick. Holding the brush
thus, and stroking it in this way, the bristles send a
shower of ink spots upon the drawing. Of course this
trick requires an extended practice before it can be
performed in workmanlike fashion, and even then the
parts not required to be splattered have to be carefully
covered with cut-paper masks. [Mem. — To use a fixed
ink for drawings on which you intend to splatter, because
it is extremely probable that you will require to paint
some portions out with Chinese white, and Chinese
white upon any inks that are not fixed is the despair of
the draughtsman.] Here is an excellent example of
splatter. It is by that resourceful American draughts-
man, Harry Fenn. Indeed, the greatest exponents of
this method are Americans : few men in this country
have rendered it with any frequency, or with much
advantage. I have essayed its use to aid this sunset
view of Black Rock, and to me it seems to come well.
Digitized
by Google
COMPARATIVE PROCESSES.
55
But the finer spots are very difficult of reproduction ;
some are lost here. There is a most ingenious con-
6x8J.
SUNSET, BLACK ROCK.
SplatUr-work.
trivance, an American notion, I believe, for the better
application of splatter. It is called the air-brush, and it
consists of a tube filled with ink, and fitted with a
Digitized
by Google
56 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
description of nozzle through which the ink is projected
on to paper by a pneumatic arrangement worked by the
artist by means of a treadle. You aim the affair at your
drawing, work your treadle, and the trick is done. The
splatter is remarkably fine and equable, and its intensity
can be regulated by the distance at which the nozzle is
held. from the drawing. The greater advantage, how-
ever, in the use of the air-brush would seem to lie
with the lithographic draughtsmen, who have to cover
immense areas of work.
Here follows an experiment with diluted inks : the
drawing made upon HP Whatman with all manner of
nibs. It is all pen-work, worked with black stain, and
with writing ink watered down to different values. This
is an attempt to render as truthfully as possible (and as
unconventionally) the sunset shine and shadow of a
lonely shore, blown upon with the wild winds of the
Channel. A little stream, overgrown with bents and
waving rushes, flows between a break in the low cliffs
and loses itself in the sands. The sun sets behind the
ruined house, and between it and the foreground is a
clump of storm-bent trees, constrained to their uneasy
inward pose not by px-esent breezes, but to this shrink-
Digitized
by Google
Digitized
by Google
Digitized
by Google
COMPARATIVE PROCESSES. 59
ing habit of growth by long-continued stress of weather.
The block is by Gillot, of Paris, who was asked to get
the appearance of the original drawing in a line-block.
This he has not altogether succeeded in ^doing : perhaps
it was impossible ; but the feeling is here. It is a line-
block, rouletted all over in the attempt to get the effect
produced by watered inks. The roulettes, by which
these greynesses are produced, are peculiar instruments,
consisting of infinitesimal wheels of hard steel whose
edges are fashioned into microscopically small points or
facets. Mounted at the end of a stick more nearly
resembling a penholder than anything else, the wheel is
driven along (and into) the surface of the metal by
pressure, making small indentations in it. There are
varieties of roulettes, the differences between them lying
in the patterns of the projections from the wheel. The
varieties in the texture of rouletting seen in this print
are thus explained.
Now come some experiments in mixtures. The
mixed drawing has many possibilities of artistic expres-
sion, and here are some essays in mixtures, harnessed to
tentative employments of process.
First is this experiment in pen and pencil reproduced
Digitized
by Google
6o DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
in half-tone. It is a view of Chepstow Castle — that
really picturesque old border fortress — from across the
river Wye, a river that comes rushing down from the
uplands with an impetuous current full of swirls and
eddies. The town of Chepstow lies at the back, repre-
sented in this drawing only by its lights. The huts and
sheds that straggle down to the waterside, and the
rotting pier, where small vessels load and unload insigni-
ficant cargoes, are commonplace enough, but they go to
make a fine composition ; and the last sunburst in the
evening sky, the stars already brilliant, and the white
gleams from the hurrying river, are immensely valuable,
and things of joy to the practitioner in black and white.
Rain had fallen during the day, and, when the present
writer sat down to sketch, still lent a fine impending
juicy air to the scene that seemed incapable of adequate
translation into pure line ; therefore, upon the pencil
sketch was added pen-work, and to that more pencil,
and, when finished, the drawing was sent to be pro-
cessed, with special instructions that the white spaces in
the sky should be preserved, together with those on the
buildings, but that all else might acquire the light grey
tint which the half-tone always gives, as of a drawing
Digitized
by Google
i
I
3 ^
2
00
X
Digitized
by Google
^ OF THE '^
LUNIVERSITT,
Digitized
by Google
i
COMPARATIVE PROCESSES. 63
made upon paper of a silvery grey. In the result you
can see this purely arbitrary, but delightful, ground tint
everywhere ; it gives absolutely the appearance of a
drawing made upon tinted cardboard, but, truly, the
only paper employed was a common, rough make, that
would be despised of the lordly amateur. Here you see
the half-tone process on its best behaviour, and I think
it has secured ia very notable result.
Here is another experiment, Cliffords Inn : a Foggy
Night — a mixture of pen and ink and crayon worked
upon with a stump, and then lightly brushed over with
a damp, not a full, brush ; the lights in the windows and
the reflections taken out with the point of an eraser.
It should be said that in drawing thus for half-
I.
tone reproduction the drawing should be made much
more emphatic than the print is intended to appear ;
that is to say, the deepest shadows should be given an
additional depth, and the fainter shading should be a
shade lighter than you would give to a drawing not
made with a view to publication. If these points are
not borne in mind, the result is apt to be flat and
featureless.
If a half-tone block exhibits these disagreeable
Digitized
by Google
64 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
peculiarities, high lights can always be created by the
aid of a chisel used upon the metal surface of the
block. The more important process firms generally
employ a staff of competent engravers, who, now that
wood engraving is less widely used, have turned their
attention to just this kind of work — the correcting of
process-blocks. The artist has but to mark his proof
with the corrections and alterations he requires. The
two illustrations shown on page 68, from different
states of the same block, give a notion of correcting
the flatness of half-tone. The second block shows
a good deal of retouching in the lights taken out
upon the paper and the jug, and in the hatching upon
the drinking-horn.
Half-tone processes are practised in much the same
way as the albumen and bitumen line methods already
described, in so far as that they are worked with acids
and upon zinc or copper. At first these half-tone
blocks were made in zinc, but recently some repro-
ductive firms have preferred to use copper. Messrs.
Waterlow and Sons, in this country, generally employ
copper for half-tone blocks from drawings or photo-
graphs. Copper prints a softer and more sympathetic
Digitized
by Google
9h X 6i
CLIFFORD'S INN : A FOGGY NIGHT.
Drawn in pen and ink ani crayon, and brushed over. Reproduced by half-tone; process^
medium grain.
Digitized
by Google
:tjniversitt
Digitized
by Google
COMPARATIVE PROCESSES. 6/
line, and does not accumulate dirt so readily as zinc.
All the half-tone blocks in this volume are in copper.
By these processes the photographs that one sees re-
produced direct from nature appear in print without
the aid of the artist. They are often referred to as the
Meisenbach process, because the Meisenbagh Company
was amongst the first to use these methods in this
country. The essential difference in their working is
that there is a ruled screen of glass interposed between
the drawing or object to be photographed and the
negative. Generally a screen of glass is closely ruled
with lines crossing at right angles, and etched with
hydrofluoric acid. Into the grooves thus produced, print-
ing-ink is rubbed. The result is a close network of
black lines upon glass. This screen, interposed between
the sensitized plate in the camera and the object to be
photographed, produces upon the negative the criss-
cross appearance we see in the ultimate picture. In the
half-tone reproductions by Angerer and Goschl, of
Vienna, this appearance is singularly varied. The
screen used by them is said to be made from white silk
of the gauziest description, hung before a wall covered
with black velvet in such a manner that the blackness
Digitized
by Google
6f X 61
PENCIL AND PEN AND INK DRAWING REPRODUCED BY
HALF-TONE PROCESS.
Digitized
by Google
COMPARATIVE PROCESSES. 69
of the velvet can be seen and photographed through the
silken film. A negative is made, and from it a positive
is produced, which exhibits a curiously varied arrange-
ment of dots and meshes. The positive is used in the
same way as the ruled-glass screens.
The network characteristic of half-tone relief blocks
can be made fine, or medium, or coarse, as required.
The fine-grained blocks are used for careful book and
magazine printing, and the medium-grained for printing
in the better illustrated weeklies ; the coarse-grained are
used for rougher printing, but still are nearly always too
fine for newspaper work. The Daily Graphic, however,
has solved the problem of printing them sufficiently well
for the picture to be discerned. Beyond this the rotary
steam-printing press has not yet advanced.
In appearance somewhat similar to a half-tone block,
but with the tint differently applied, is the illustration of
The Village Street, Tintern: Night. Here is a pure
pen-drawing, scratched and scribbled to blackness with-
out much care for finesse, the great reduction and the
tint being reckoned upon to assuage all angularities.
The original drawing was then h'ghtly scribbled over
with blue pencil to indicate to the process -man that a
Digitized
by Google
70
DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
mechanical tint was required to be applied upon the
block, and word was specially sent that the tint was
to be squarely cut, not vignetted. The result seems
happy. This is a line block, not tone.
In such a case the procedure is normal until the
image is printed upon the sensitized ground of the zinc
11JX9.
THE VILLAGE STREET, TINTERN. NIGHT.
Application ofsheuiing medium,
plate. Then the prescribed tint is transferred by pres-
sure of thumb and fingers, or by means of a burnisher,
from an engraved sheet of gelatine previously inked
with a printing roller. The zinc plate is then etched in
the familiar way.
These tints are produced by Day's shading mediums ;
Digitized
by Google
'^
^
00
X
Digitized
by Google
' OF THE . '
uisrivERST.
rsj]
Digitized
by Google
1
COMPARATIVE PROCESSES. 73
thin sheets of gelatine engraved upon one side with
lines or with a pattern of stipple. There are very many
of these patterns. They can readily be applied, and
with the greatest accuracy, because the gelatine is semi-
transparent, and admits of the operator seeing what he
is about. These mechanical tints are capable of ex-
quisite application, but they have been more frequently
regarded as labour-saving appliances, and have rarely
been used with skill, and so have come to bear an
altogether unmerited stigma. They can be used by a
clever process-man, under the directions of the draughts-
man, with great effect, and in remarkably diverse ways.
For it is not at all necessary that the tint should come
all over the block. It can be worked in most intricately.
The illustration, Leebotwoody shows an application of
shading medium to the sky. The proprietors (for it is a
patent) of these devices have endeavoured to introduce
their use amongst artists, with a view to their working
the mediums upon the drawings themselves. It has
been shown that the varieties of shading to be obtained
by shifting and transposing the gelatine plates is illimit-
able, but as their use involves establishing a printing
roller and printer s ink in one's studio, and as all artists
Digitized
by Google
74 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION,
are not printers born, it does not seem at all likely that
Day's shading mediums will be used outside litho-
graphic offices or the offices of reproductive firms.
Here are appended some examples of the shading
mediums commonly used.
The cost of reproduction by process varies very
greatly. It is always calculated at so much the square
inch, with a minimum charge ranging, for line work,
from two-and-sixpence to five shillings. For half-
tone the minimum may be put at from ten shillings
to sixteen shillings. Plain line blocks, by the bitumen
or albumen processes, cost from twopence-halfpenny to
sixpence per square inch, and handwork upon the block
is charged extra. Some firms make a charge of one
penny per square inch for the application of Day's
shading mediums. Line blocks by the swelled gelatine
process are charged at one shilling per square inch,
and reproductions of pencil or crayon work at one-
and- threepence. Half-tone blocks from objects, photo-
graphs, or drawings range from eightpence to one-
and-sixpence per square inch, and the cost of a
photogravure plate may be put at two-and-sixpence
for the same unit. The best work in any photo-
Digitized
by Google
' I* i' * Tr *" * ' * •'■' i *■ '■Vi '■"•!'
EXAMPLES OF DAY*S SHADING MEDIUMS.
Digitized
by Google
76
DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
graphic process is infinitely less costly than wood en-
graving, which, although its cost is not generally calcu-
^■TITTT^:^?^
l-:,^. •--■:■ -■: - .V-
M
^
■■'iv
■'i^
-y]
4C^-:
■-'5j
:kr. •
'■:^^
mi
Wm
EXAMPLES OF DAY's SHADING MEDIUM.
CHURCHYARD CROSS, RAGLAN.
Application of shading medium.
lated on the basis of the inch, as in all process work,
Digitized
by Google
COMPARATIVE PROCESSES.
may range approximately from three shillings to five
shillings for engraving of average merit.
Electrotype copies of line blocks cost from three-
farthings to three-halfpence per square inch, and from
half-tone blocks, twopence, although it is not advisable to
have electrotypes taken of these fine and delicate blocks.
If duplicates are wanted of half-tones, the usual practice
is to have two original blocks made, the process-engraver
charging for the second block half the price of the first.
Digitized
by Google
PAPER.
The process engraver will tell you, if you seek counsel
of him, that you should use Bristol-board, and of that
only the smoothest and most highly finished varieties.
But, however easy it may render his work of reproduc-
tion, there is no necessity for you to draw upon card-
board or smooth-surfaced paper at all. Paper of a
reasonable whiteness is, of course, necessary to any
process of line engraving which has photography as a
basis, but to say that stiff cardboards or papers of a
blue-white, as opposed to the cream-laid variety, are
necessary is merely to obscure what is, after all, a
simple matter.
Bristol-board is certainly a very favourite material,
and the varieties of cardboards sold under that name
are numerous enough to please anybody. Goodall's
sell as reliable a make as can be readily found. It is
Digitized
by Google
PAPER. 79
white enough to please the photo-engraver, and of a
smooth, hard surface ; and a hard surface you must have
for pen-work. But it is an unsympathetic material, and
it is an appreciably more difficult matter to make a
pencil sketch upon it than upon such papers as
Whatman's HP.
Mounting-boards are frequently used, chiefly for
journalistic pen-work, when it may be supposed nobody
cares anything about the finesse of the art, but only that
the drawing shall be up to a certain standard of excel-
lence, and, more particularly, up to time. Mounting-
boards are appreciably cheaper than good Bristol-board,
but if erasures are to be made they are troublesome,
because under the surface they are composed of the
shoddiest of matter. They are convenient, indeed
admirable, for studies carried out in a masculine manner
with a quill pen, or for simple drawings made with an
ordinary writing nib, with not too sharp a point. For
delicate technique they are not to be recommended.
Indeed, for anything but work done at home, card-
boards of any sort are inexpedient ; they are heavy, and
take up too much space. If they were necessary, of
course you would have to put up^irft thBf^jJJo^ivenience
Digitized
by Google
8o DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
of carrying two or more pounds weight of them about
with you, but they are not necessary.
Every one who makes drawings in pen and ink is
continually looking out for an ideal paper ; many have
found their ideals in this respect ; but that paper which
one man swears by, another will, not inconceivably,
swear at, so no recommendation can be trusted.
Again, personal predilections change amazingly. One
day you will be able to use Bristol-board with every
satisfaction ; another, you will find its smooth, dead
white, immaculate surface perfectly dispiriting. No
one's advice can be implicitly followed in respect of
papers, inks, or pens. Every one must find his own
especial fancy, and when he has found it he will produce
the better work.
The pen-draughtsman who is a paper-fancier does
not leave untried even the fly-leaves of his correspon-
dence. Papers have been found in this way which have
proved satisfactory. All you have to do is to go to
some large stationer or wholesale papermaker's and
get your fancy matched. It would be an easy matter to
obtain sheets larger than note-paper.
Whatman's HP, or hot-pressed drawing-paper, is
Digitized
by Google
PAPER. 8 1
good for pen-drawing, but its proper use is not very
readily learnt. To begin with, the surface is full of
little granulations and occasional fibres which catch
the pen and cause splutterings and blots. Sometimes,
too, you happen upon insutficiently sized Whatman,
and then lines thicken almost as if the drawing were
being made upon blotting-paper.
A good plan is to select some good HP Whatman
and have it calendered. Any good stationer could put
you in the way of getting the calendering done, or
possibly such a firm as Dickinsons', manufacturers of
paper, in Old Bailey, could be prevailed upon to do it.
If you want a firm, hard, clear-cut line, you will of
course use only Bristol-board or mounting-board, or
papers with a highly finished surface. Drawings upon
Whatman's papers give in the reproductions broken
and granulated lines which the process-man (but no
one else) regards as defects. Should the block itself be
defective, he will doubtless point to the paper as the
cause, but there is no reason why the best results should
not proceed from HP paper. Messrs. Reeves and
Sons, of Cheapside, sell what they call London boards.
These are sheets of Whatman mounted upon card-
G
Digitized
by Google
82 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
' board. They offer the advantages of the H P surface
with the rigidity of the Bristol-board. The Art Tablets
sold by the same firm are cardboards with Whatman
paper mounted on either side. A drawing can be made
upon both sides and the tablet split up afterwards.
In connection with illustration, amongst the most
remarkable inventions of late years are the prepared
cardboards generally known amongst illustrators as
*' scratch-out cardboards/' introduced by Messrs.
Angerer and Goschl of Vienna, and by M. Gillot of
Paris. These cardboards are of several kinds, but are
all prepared with a surface of kaolin, or china-clay.
Reeves sell eight varieties of these clay-boards. They
are somewhat expensive, costing two shillings a sheet of
nineteen by thirteen inches, but when their use is well
understood they justify their existence by the rich
effects obtained, and by the saving of time effected in
drawing upon them. Drawings made upon these pre-
parations have all the fulness and richness of wash,
pencil, or crayon, and may be reproduced by line
processes at the same cost as a pen-drawing made upon
plain paper. The simplest variety of clay-board is the
one prepared with a plain white surface, upon which a
Digitized
by Google
drawing may be made with pen and ink, or with a
brush, the lights taken out with a scraper or a sharp-
pointed knife. It is advisable to work upon all clay-
surfaced papers or cardboards with pigmental inks, as,
for instance, lampblack, ivory-black, or Indian ink.
Ebony stain is not suitable. The more liquid inks and
stains have a tendency to soak through the prepared
surface of china-clay, rather than to rest only upon it,
thereby rendering the cardboard useless for "scratch-
out" purposes, and of no more value than ordinary
drawing-paper. A drawing made upon plain clay-board
with pen and brush, using lampblack as a medium, can
be worked upon very effectively with a sharp point.
White lines of a character not to be obtained in any
other way can be thus produced with happy effect. Mr.
Hey wood Sumner has made some of his most striking
decorative drawings in this manner. It is a manner
of working remarkably akin to the wood-engraver s art —
that is to say, drawing or engraving in white lines upon
a black field — only of course the cardboard is more
readily worked upon than the wood block. Indeed,
wood-engravers have frequently used this plain clay-
board. They have had the surface sensitized, the
Digitized
by Google
84
DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
drawing photographed and printed upon it, and have
then proceeded to take out lights, to cut out white
lines, and to hatch and cross-hatch, until the result looks
in every way similar to a wood engraving. This has
then been photographed again, and a zinc block made
that in the printing would defy even an expert to
detect.
Other kinds of clay-boards are impressed with a
grain or with plain indented lines, or printed upon with
black lines or reticulations, which may be scratched
through with a point, or worked upon with brush or
pen. Examples are given here :
CANVAS-GRAIN CLAY-BOARD.
No. I. White cardboard, impressed with a plain
canvas grain.
Digitized
by Google
PAPER.
85
This gives a fine painty effect, as shown in the
drawing of polled willows : a drawing made in pencil,
with lights in foreground grass and on tree-trunks
PLAIN DIAGONAL GRAIN.
scratched out with a knife or with the curved-bladed
eraser sold for use with these preparations.
iPPipfflwiwwfflfi
r^wT-riwPyyFT^^
:i'i. ^
IlidUUibktMl 4dWI MID ' ULiiWHikLlalllllll mill
PLAIN PERPENDICULAR GRAIN.
2. Plain white diagonal lines. Pencil drawing.
Digitized
by Google
86
DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION,
3. Plain white perpendicular lines. Pencil drawing.
4. Plain white aquatint grain. Pencil drawing.
These four varieties require greater care and a
lighter hand in working than the others, because their
patterns are not very deeply stamped, and consequently
the furrows between the upstanding lines are apt to
become filled with pencil, and tp give a broken and
spotty effect in the reproduction.
:'^^:::fi^^:!^^;:^,-=:--
DRAWING IN PENCIL ON WHITE AQUATINT GRAIN
CLAY-BOARD.
5. Black aquatint. This is not a variety in constant
use. Three states are shown.
6. Black diagonal lines. This is the pattern in
greater requisition. The method of working is shown,
Digitized
ed by Google
^^^^H|^^ij|;! ' '
!;!^^'^|>!^
/'"/; 'i^y^^^H
HRi'
^i;9H
^•■.■;it-%:;;-. ■;■„■!■ ..■ ■ '.^
' ■■■il
f, ■'.«"■;
life-.
■r.
BLACK AQUATINT CLAY-BOARD AND TWO
STAGES OF DRAWING.
BLACK DIAGONAL-LINED CLAY-BOARD
AND TWO STAGES OF DRAWING.
Digitized
by Google
88
DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
but the possibilities of this pattern are seen admirably
and to the best advantage in the illustration of
Venetian Fite on the Seine.
7. Black perpendicular lines. Same as No. 6,
except in direction of line.
BLACK PERPENDICULAR-LINED CLAY-BOARD AND TWO STAGES OF DRAWING.
Digitized
by Google
Digitized
by Google
ITJNIVERSITY^
Digitized
by Google
PAPER, 91
Drawings made upon these grained and ridged
papers must not be stumped down or treated in any-
way that would fill up the interstices, which give the
lined and granular effect capable of reproduction by
line-process. Also, it is very important to note that
drawings on these papers can only be subjected to a
slight reduction of scale — say, a reduction at most by
one quarter. The closeness of the printed grains and
lines forbids a smaller scale that shall be perfect. Mr.
C. H. Shannon has drawn upon lined "scratch-out*'
cardboard with the happiest effect.
Digitized
by Google
PENS.
A. COMMON delusion as to pens for drawing is that only
the finer-pointed kinds are suitable. To the contrary,
most of the so-called ** etching pens" and crow-quills
and liliputian affairs sold are not only unnecessary, but
positively harmful. They encourage the niggling
methods of the amateur, and are, besides, untrustworthy
and dreadfully scratchy. You can but rarely depend
upon them for the drawing of a continuous line ;
frequently they refuse to mark at all. I know very
well that I shall be exclaimed against when I say that
a good medium -pointed pen or fine-pointed school nib
are far better than three-fourths of the pens especially
made for draughtsmen, but that is the case.
With practice, one can use almost any writing nib
for the production of a pen-drawing. Even the broad-
pointed J pen is useful. Quill pens are delightful to
Digitized
by Google
PENS. 93
work with for the making of pen-studies in a bold, free
manner. A well-cut quill flies over all descriptions of
paper, rough or smooth, without the least catching of
fibres or spluttering. It is the freest and least trammel-
ling of pens, and seems almost to draw of its own
volition.
Brandauer's pens are, generally, very good, chiefly
for the reason that they have circular points that rarely
become scratchy. They make a smaL nib. No. 515,
which works and wears well ; this last an unusual
quality in the small makes. Perry & Co. sell two very
similar nibs, No. 601 (a so-called "etching pen") and
No. 25 ; they are both scratchy. Gillott's crowquill.
No. 659, is a barrel pen, very small and very good,
flexible, and capable of producing at once the finest
and the boldest lines ; but Brandauer's Oriental pen.
No. 342 EF, an ordinary fine-pointed writing pen, is
just as excellent, and its use is more readily learnt. It
takes some time and practice to discover the capabilities
of the Gillott crowquill ; the other pen's possibilities
are easier found. Besides, the tendency with a micro-
scopic nib is to niggled work, which is not to be desired
at the cost of vigour. Mitchell's F pen is a fine-pointed
Digitized
by Google
94 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
school writing nib. It is not particularly flexible, but
very reliable and lasts long. Gillott has recently
introduced a very remarkable nib, No. looo, frankly
a drawing pen, flexible in the extreme, capable of
producing at will the finest of hair-lines or the broadest
of strokes.
Some illustrators make line drawings with a brush.
Mr. J. F. Sullivan works in this way, using a red sable
brush with all superfluous hairs cut away, and fashioned
to a point. Lampblack is the best medium for the
brush.
To draw in line with a brush requires long practice
and great dexterity, but men who habitually work in
this way say that its use once learnt, no one would ex-
change it for the pen. Of this I can express no opinion.
Certainly there are some obvious advantages in using
a brush. It does not ever penetrate the surface of the
paper, and it is capable of producing the most solid and
smooth lines.
Stylographic and fountain pens, of whatever make,
are of no use whatever. Glass pens are recommended
by some draughtsmen for their quality of drawing an
equable line ; but they would seem to be chiefly useful
Digitized
by Google
PENS. 95
in mathematical and engineering work, which demands
the same thickness of line throughout. These pens
would also prove very useful in architects' offices, in
drawing profiles of mouldings, tracery, and crockets,
because, not being divided into two nibs, they make any
variety of curve without the slightest alteration in the
character of the line produced. Any one accustomed
to use the ordinary divided nibs will know the difficulty
of drawing such curves with them.
Digitized
by Google
INKS.
It is, perhaps, more difficult to come by a thoroughly
reliable ink than to be exactly suited with papers and
pens ; and yet greater attention has been given by
manufacturers to inks than to those other necessaries.
You can, often with advantage, use a writing pen ;
but no one, however clever he may be, can make a
satisfactory drawing for reproduction with the aid of
writing-inks. They are either not black enough, or
else are too fluid, so that it is impossible to run lines
close together, or to cross-hatch without the ink running
the lines into one another. It may, perhaps, be remarked
that this is an obvious error, since many of Keenes
most delightful drawings and studies were made in
writing-inks — black, blue-black, or diluted, or even in
red, and violet, and blue inks. Certainly Keene was a
great man in whatever medium he used, but he was
not accustomed to be reproduced in any other way
Digitized
by Google
INKS. 97
than by so-called facsimile wood engraving. In this
way all his greynesses and faint lines could have their
relative values translated, but even in the cleverest
surface-printing processes his work could not be
adequately reproduced.
Stephens's ebony stain is perhaps the most widely
used ink at this time. It is not made for the purpose
of drawing, being a stain for wood ; but its merits for
pen-drawing have been known for some considerable
time. It is certainly the best, cheapest, and least
troublesome medium in the market. It is, when not
diluted, an intensely black liquid with an appreciable
body, but not too thick to flow freely. It dries with
a certain but not very obtrusive glaze, which process-
engravers at one time objected to most strongly, because
they wanted something to object to on principle; but
they have at length become tired of remonstrating, and
really there was never any objection to the stain upon
that score. It flows readily from the pen, and when
drying upon the nib is not gummy nor in any way
adhesive, but powders easily — avoiding the abomination
of a pen clogged with a sticky mess of half-dry mud,
characteristic of the use of Indian ink. Ebony stain
H
Digitized
by Google
98 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION,
is sold in substantial stone bottles, and so does not
readily become thick ; but when, owing to any cause,
it does not run freely enough, a sparing dilution with
water restores its fluid properties. Diluted too often
or too freely, it becomes of a decided purple-brown
tint ; but as a good-sized bottle costs only sixpence,
and holds enough to last a year, it need not* be re-
peatedly diluted on the score of its cost. It is not a
fixed ink, and readily smudges when washed over or
spotted with water — so cannot be used in combination
with water-colour or flat-washes. Neither can Chinese
white be used upon a drawing made in Ebony stain.
These are disadvantages that would tell against its use
by illustrators who make many alterations upon their
work, or who paint in lights on a pen-drawing with
body-colour ; but for pure pen-drawing, and for straight-
away journalistic work, it is invaluable.
Indian ink is the traditional medium. It has the
advantage of fixity ; lines drawn with it, when once dry,
will not smudge when washed over, and, at most, they
give but a very slight grey or brown tint to the paper.
Indian ink can be bought in sticks and ground with
water in a saucer ; but there seems to be no reason
Digitized
by Google
INKS. 99
for any one to go to this trouble, as liquid Indian
inks are to be bought in bottles from Messrs. Reeves.
The best Indian ink, when freshly ground, gives a
fine black line that dries with that bogey of the
process-man, a glaze ; but lampblack is of a more
intense blackness, and dries with a dull surface.
Lampblack is easily soluble, and therefore has not the
stability of good Indian ink to recommend it. For
ordinary use with the pen, it has too much of the pig-
mental nature, and is very apt to clog the nib and
to cause annoyance and loss of time. Lampblack and
Ivory-black are better suited to the brush. Hentschel,^
of 182, Fleet Street, sells an American preparation
called ** Whiting's Process- Drawing Ink," which pro-
fesses to have all the virtues that should accompany
a drawing-ink. It is very abominable, and has an
immediate corrosive effect upon pens. The drawing-
materials shop in King William Street, Strand, sells
** Higgins' American Drawing Ink," done up in ingeni-
ously contrived bottles. It is well spoken of.
Encre de Chine Liquide is the best liquid Indian
ink sold, and is very largely used by draughtsmen. It
can be obtained readily at any good colour-shop. It is
Digitized
by Google
lOO DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
far preferable to most of the liquid Indian inks pre-
pared by English houses, which when left standing for
a few minutes deposit a sediment, and at best are
inadequate concoctions of a greenish - grey colour.
Messrs. Reeves and Sons have recently introduced
a special ink for pen-drawing, which they call ** Artists'
Black.*' It is as good as any. It is a liquid ink,
sold in shilling bottles.
Mr. Du Maurier uses blue-black writing-ink from
an inkstand that is always allowed to stand open and
receive dust and become half muddy. He prefers it
in this condition. Also he generally works upon HP
drawing-paper. It is interesting to know this, but to
work in blue-black ink is an amiable eccentricity that
might prove disastrous to any one following his example.
His work is not reproduced by zincography, but by
facsimile wood engraving. It may be laid down as an
inflexible rule, if you are beginning the study of pen-
drawing, if your work is for hurried newspaper produc-
tion, or if you have not the control of the reproduction
in your own hands, to draw for line-process in the
blackest ink and on the whitest paper.
Many architects and architectural draughtsmen, who
Digitized
by Google
INKS. lOI
*
are accustomed to exhibit pen-drawings of architecture
at the Royal Academy, are accustomed to draw in
brown inks. Prout s Brown is generally used, and gives
a very pleasing effect to a drawing. It photographs
and reproduces readily, but it must always be borne
in mind that, if printed in black ink, the reproduction
will inevitably be much heavier. Scarlet inks, and even
yellow inks, have been used by draughtsmen for special
purposes, and are allowable from the photographic point
of view ; but blue must not be used, being an actinic
colour and impossible to photograph.
Digitized
by Google
THE MAKING OF A PEN-DRAWING.
It is not to be supposed that because the pen is so
handy an instrument, and inks and paper, of sorts, are
everywhere, that the making of a pen-drawing is a
simple affair of a few uneducated strokes. The less
you know of the art, the easier it seems, and they do
but show their ignorance who speak of its simplicity.
You will want as much power of draughtsmanship, and
more, for drawing in this medium than in many others ;
because the difference between good drawing and bad
is more readily seen in line-work than in other methods,
and since in these days the standard of the art has
been raised so high. You will want not less study in
the open air, or with the life-class for figure-work,
than the painter gives or should give to his preliminary
studies for his art. This drudgery you will have to
go through, whether in the schools of the Science and
Digitized
by Google
THE MAKING OF A PEN-DRAWING. IO3
Art Department (which does not recognize this, the
livest art of our time), or in the studio and under
the care of some artist who receives pupils in the
fashion of the atMer system in France. But such
studios are rare in England. It seems likely that the
student of pen-drawing, who starts with learning
draughtsmanship of any sort, must first go through
much of the ordinary grind of the schools, and, when
he has got some sort of proficiency, turn to and worry
out the application of the pen to his already received
teaching. No one will teach him pen-drawing as an
individual art ; of that there is no doubt. Perhaps the
best course he could pursue would be to become
acquainted with the books illustrated by the foremost
men, and study them awhile to see in what manner
they work with the pen, and with this knowledge set
to work with models, in the same way as a painter
would do. Or, if your work is of another branch beside
the figure, go to the fields, the hedgerows, and all the
glory of the country-side, and work first-hand. The
sketch-book is a necessity, and should always be in
the student's pocket for the jotting down of notes and
memoranda.
Digitized
by Google
I04 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION,
I do not think many pen-draughtsmen are careful
enough to make a thorough pencil study as the basis
of their pen-drawing, although that is the best way to
proceed, and their drawings would be all the better
for the practice. It is to this absence of the pre-
liminary pencil-work, this shirking of an undoubted
drudgery, that is due the quantity of uninspired,
fumbling drawing with the pen that we see nowadays.
The omission of a carefully made original pencil-sketch,
over which to work in pen and ink, renders common-
place the work of many artists which, if only they were
less impatient of toil, would become transfigured. What
is so injurious to the man who has learnt his art is
fatal to one who is by way of beginning its study.
Make, then, a pencil-drawing in outline, using an HB
pencil, as carefully as if that only were the end and
object of your work. Work lightly with this hard
pencil upon the paper or cardboard you have selected,
indicating shadows rather than filling them in. It is
necessary to make only faint pencil lines, for they will
have to be rubbed out eventually, after the pen-drawing
has been made over them. If the marks were deep
and strong, a great deal of rubbing would have to be
Digitized
by Google
THE MAKING OF A PEN-DRAWING. 105
done to get them out, and that injures the surface of
the paper and greys the black lines of the ink used.
On the other hand, if the pencil-marks were not rubbed
out, they would very likely photograph and reproduce
in the process-block. To a pen-draughtsman of ex-
perience the reproduction of his pencil-marks can be
made an additional beauty; but the student had much
better be, at first, a purist, and make for clean pen-
strokes alone on his finished drawing.
It must always be remembered, if you are working
for reproduction (and consequent reduction of scale
from the drawing to the process-block), that the pen-
work you have seen printed in the books and papers
and magazines was made on a much larger scale than
you see it reproduced in their pages. Very frequently,
as in the American magazines, the reduction is to about
one quarter scale of the original drawing ; but, working
for process in England, the drawing should, generally
speaking, be from two-thirds to one-half larger than
the reproduction. These proportions will, as a rule,
give excellent results.
Seeing that your drawing is to be so much larger
than the process-block, it follows that the pen- work can,
^UFORNIAl
Digitized by CjOOQ IC
106 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION,
with advantage, be correspondingly vigorous. It would
help you better than any description to a notion of
what an original drawing should be like, if you could .
obtain a glance at the originals of any good pen-
draughtsmen. But unfortunately, there are few exhi-
bitions in which pen-work has any place.
When your pencil study is completed in an outline
giving all details down to the minutest, you can set
about the pen-drawing. Often, indeed, if carefully
made, the pencil-sketch looks too good to be
covered up with ink. If you wish to retain it, it can,
if made upon thin paper, be traced upon cardboard
with the aid of black carbon paper, or better still (since
blue will not photograph) with blue transfer paper,
which you can either purchase or make for yourself by
taking thin smooth paper and rubbing powdered blue
chalk upon one side of it, or scribbling closely upon it
with blue pencil. There is another way of tracing the
pencil-drawing : by pinning over it a sheet of thin
correspondence paper (of the kind called Bank Post)
and working upon that straight away.
But, after all, it would, for the sake of retaining
something of the freshness of first impressions, be
Digitized
by Google
THE MAKING OF A PEN-DRAWING. 107
best to sacrifice your pencil study and work away
on that.
Now the pen-drawing is begun, care should be
taken to draw only clear and perfectly black lines, and
not to run these together, but to keep the drawing what
the process men call " open."
If details are put in without regard for the fining
down which reduction gives, it is only too likely that
the result will show only dirty, meaningless patches
where was a great deal of delicate pen- work. Of
course, the exact knowledge of how to draw with the
pen to get the best results by process cannot properly
be taught, but must be learned by experience, after
many miscalculations.
It will be found, too, that many things which it
would be inadvisable for the beginner to do (especially
if he cannot command his own choice of process-
engraver) are perfectly legitimate to the practised
artist who has studied process work. The student
should not be at first encouraged to make experiments
in diluted inks or retained pencil - marks, or any
of those delightful practices by which one who is
thoroughly conversant with photographic processes and
Digitized
by Google
I08 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
pen-drawing varies the monotony of his medium. He
should begin by making his drawings as simply as he
can, so that they express his subject. And this sim-
plicity, this quality of suggestion, is the true field of
pen-work. The best work is reticent and sober, giving
the greatest number of essential facts in the fewest
strokes. If you can express a fact with sufficient
intelligibility in half a dozen pen strokes, it is inartistic
and inexpedient to worry it into any number of
scratches. This is often done because the public likes
to see that there has been plenty of manual labour put
into the work it buys. It is greatly impressed with the
knowledge that any particular drawing took days to
complete, and it respects that drawing accordingly, and
has nothing but contempt for a sketch which may have
taken only an hour or so, although the first may be
artless and overloaded with unnecessary detail, and the
second instinct with actuality and suggestion. But if
you are drawing a landscape with a pen, that is no
reason for putting in an elaborate foreground of grass,
carefully working up each square inch. Such a subject
can be rendered by a master in a few strokes, and
though, possibly, you may never equal the artistry
Digitized
by Google
THE MAKING OF A PEN-DRAWING, 109
of the master, you can follow his ideals. Another and
allied point in pen-and-ink art is its adaptability to
what is termed " selection." You have, say, before
you the view or object to be drawn. You do not need
to make a drawing in which you shall niggle up every
part of it, but you select (the trained eye readily does
this) its salient feature and emphasize it and make
it fall properly into the composition, leaving aught else
either suggested or less thoroughly treated. Here
is a pen-drawing made with a very special regard to a
selection only of the essential. The Gatehouse, Moynes
Courfy is a singular structure near the shore of the
Severn estuary, two miles below Chepstow. The singu-
larity of its design, rarely paralleled in England, would
give the artist the motive for sketching, and its tapering
lines and curious roofs are best preserved in a drawing
that deals chiefly in outline, and has but little shading
wherewith to confuse the queer profile of these effective
towers. This drawing was reproduced by the bitumen
process. The lines in the foreground, suggestive of
grass, were drawn in pencil. The pen-sketches and
studies of the foremost artists which have been made,
not for publication, but for practice, but which have
Digitized
by Google
no
DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
sometimes been reproduced, as, for instance, some slight
sketches of Charles Keene's, delight the artist's eye
7ix9.
THE GATEHOUSE, MOYNES COURT.
Bitumen process. Drawing showing value of selection.
simply by reason of their suggestive and selective
qualities. If you do not delight in these things, but
Digitized
by Google
THE MAKING OF A PEN-DRAWING. Ill
have a desire to (as the untaught public might say) " see
them finished," then it seems likely either that you have
not the artistic sense, or else you have not sufficient
training ; but I should suspect you were in the first
category, and should then advise you to leave matters
artistic alone.
You should not forget that in drawing for repro-
duction you are not working like the painter of a
picture. The painter s picture exists for its own sake*
not, like a pen or wash drawing, as only the means to
an end. The end of these drawings is illustration, and
when this is frankly acknowledged, no one has any
right to criticize the neatness or untidiness of the
means, so long as the end is kept properly in view.
We have not yet arrived at that stage of civiliza-
tion when black-and-white art shall be appreciated as
fully as colour. When we have won to that pinnacle
of culture, then perhaps an original drawing in pen
or monochrome will be cherished for its own sake ; at
present we are barbaric mpre than enough, and bright
hues attract us only in lesser degree than our "friend
and brother/' Quashee from the Congo. How nearly
related we are these preferences may show more readily
Digitized
by Google
112 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
than the ranters impassioned oratory. As a drawing-
made for reproduction is only a stage on the way to
the printed illustration, and is not the cynosure of
collectors, it is successful or unsuccessful only in so far
as it subserves this purpose. There is really no need
for scrupulous neatness in the original ; there is no
necessity for it to have the appearance of a finished
picture or of delicate execution, so only it will wear
this appearance when reduced. That curious bugbear
of neatness causes want of breadth and vigour, and is
the cause of most of the tight and trammelled handling
we see. Draughtsmen at the outset of their career
are too much afraid of their mediums of white card-
board and ink, and too scrupulous in submitting their
original drawings, beautifully cleaned up and trimmed
round, to editors who, if they know their business, give
no better consideration to them on that account. Mr.
Ruskin has written, in his Elements of Drawing, some
most misleading things with regard to drawing with
the pen. True, his book was written in the '50's,
before pen-drawing became an art, but it has been
repeatedly reprinted even so lately as 1893, and con-
sequently it is still actively dangerous. "Coarse art,'*
Digitized
by Google
THE MAKING OF A PEN-DRA WING. 1 1 3
i.e. bold work, says Mr. Ruskin — he is speaking of
pen-drawing — "is always bad art." There you see
Mr. Ruskin holding a brief for the British public
which admires the ineffable artistry displayed in
writing the Lord's Prayer on a threepenny piece, but
deplores the immorality shown in drawings done with
a quill pen. The art of a pen-drawing is not to be
calculated on a sliding-scale graduated to micro-
scopical fractions of an inch and applied to its
individual strokes.
The appearance a drawing will present when
reduced may be approximately judged by the use of
a ** diminishing glass,'' that is to say, a concave glass.
Drawings should not be cleaned up with india-
rubber, which destroys the surface of paper or card-
board and renders lines rotten ; bread should be used,
preferably stale bread two days old, crumbled and
rubbed over the drawing with the palm of the hand.
Mr. Ruskin says that in this way "you waste the
good bread, which is wrong ; " but you had better
use a handful of " the good bread " in this way than
injure a good drawing.
The copying of wood engravings or steel prints,
I
Digitized
by Google
114 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
not for their subjects, but for their peculiar techniques y
is a vicious and inartistic practice. Time used in this
way is time wasted, and worse than wasted, because
this practice is utterly at variance with the spirit of
pen-work.
It is not a proof of artistry or consummate draughts-
manship to be able to draw a straight line or a perfect
circle, the absurd legend of Giotto and his circle
notwithstanding.
There are man)^ labour-saving tricks in drawing for
reproduction, but these have usually little connection
with the purely artistic side of illustration. They have
been devised chiefly to aid the new race of artist-
journalists in drawing for the papers which cater for
that well-known desire of the public to see its news
illustrated hot and hot. Most of these methods and the
larger proportion of the men who practice them are
frankly journalistic, but some few draughtsmen have
succeeded in resolving this sleight of hand into novel
and interesting styles, and their hurried work has
achieved a value all its own, scarcely legitimate, but
aggressive and clamouring for attention.
One of these tricks in illustration is a method
Digitized
by Google
THE MAKING OF A PEN-DRA WING. 1 1
which is. largely practised for journalistic illustration in
America — drawing in pen and ink upon photographs,
which are afterwards bleached out, the outline drawings
remaining to be processed. Although not a desirable
practice from an artistic point of view, it is advan-
tageously used for news work or upon any occasion
in which expedition is essential. The photograph to
be treated in this way is printed by the usual silver^
print method, with the exception that the paper used
is somewhat differently prepared. What is known as
*' plain salted paper " is used ; that is to say, paper
prepared without the albumen which gives to ordinary
silver-prints their smooth, shiny appearance. The
paper is prepared by being soaked in a solution made
by the following formula : —
Chlorate of ammonia ... ... ... loo grains.
Gelatine ... ... ... ... lo „
Water ... ... ... ... lo ounces.
The print is made and fixed without toning. It may
now be drawn upon with pen and Indian ink. The
ink should be perfectly black and fixed. The drawing,
if it is to be worth anything artistically, must not aim
at anything like the fulness of detail which the photo-
Digitized
by Google
Il6 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
graph possesses. An outline drawing is readily made
in this way, and a considerable amount of detail may
be achieved. Indeed, the temptation is always to go
over the photograph in • pen and ink too fully, and
only draughtsmen of accomplishment can resist this
almost irresistible inducement to do too much. Still,
admirable results have been obtained in this way by
•artists who know and practise the verj'' great virtue
of reticence.
When the drawing has been finished it is im-
mersed in a solution of bichlorate of mercury dissolved
in alcohol, which removes all traces of the photograph,
leaving the drawing showing uninjured upon plain
white paper. Omissions from the drawing may now
be supplied and corrections made, and it is now ready
for being processed. If very serious omissions are
noticed, the photograph may be conjured back by
immersing the paper in a solution of hyposulphite of
soda.
Another and readier way is to draw upon photo-
graphs printed on ferro-prussiate paper. This paper
may be purchased at any good photographic materials
shop, or it can be prepared by brushing a sheet of
Digitized
by Google
THE MAKING OF A PEN-DRAWING. 1 1 ;•
paper over with a sensitizing solution composed of the
two following solutions, A and B, prepared separately
and then mixed in equal volumes : —
{ Citrate of iron and ammonia ... \\ ounces.
I Water 8
j Ferricyanide of potassium ... ... i^ „
(Water 8
The paper must be prepared thus in a dark room
and quickly dried. It will remain in good condition
for three or four months, and- is best preserved in a
calcium tube. Prints made upon ferro-prussiate paper
are formed in Prussian blue, and are fixed in the
simplest way, on being taken from the printing frame,
by washing in cold water.
An Indian ink drawing may now be made upon
this blue photographic print, and sent for process
without the necessity of bleaching, because blue will
not reproduce. If, on the other hand, it is desired
to see the drawing as black lines upon white paper,
the blue print may be bleached out in a few seconds
by immersing it in a dish of water in which a small
piece of what chemists call carbonate of soda (common
washing soda) has been dissolved.
Digitized
by Google
Il8 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
Outline drawings for reproduction by process may-
be made upon tracing-paper. Most of the rough illus-
trations and portrait sketches printed in the morning
and evening newspapers are tracings made in this way
from photographs or from other more elaborate illus-
trations. Although this is not at all a dignified branch
of art, yet some of the little portrait heads that appear
from time to time in the St. James s Gazette^ Pall Mall
Gazette, and the Westminster Gazette are models of
selection and due economy of line, calculated to give all
the essentials of portraiture, while having due regard to
the exigencies of the newspaper printing press.
Digitized
by Google
THE MAKING OF A PEN-DRAWING. II9
The tw6~btitline portrait sketches shown here are
reproduced from the St. James s Gazette. Their thick
lines have a tendency to become offensive when sub-
jected to careful book-printing, but appearing as they
originally did in the rapidly printed editions of an
evening paper, this emphasis of line was exactly suited
to the occasion.
Translucent white tracing-paper should be used for
tracing purposes, pinned securely through the corners of
the photograph or drawing to be copied in this manner
on to a drawing-board, so that the tracing may not be
shifted while in progress. No pencilling is necessary,
but the tracing should be made in ink, straight away.
Digitized
by Google
I20 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
Fixed Indian ink should be used, because when the
tracing is finished it will be necessary for process pur-
poses to paste it upon cardboard, and, tracing-paper
being so thin, the moisture penetrates, and would
smudge a drawing made in soluble inks unless the
very greatest care was taken. Old tracing-paper which
has turned a yellow colour should on no account be ..
used, and tracing-cloth is rarely available, because,
although beautifully transparent, it is generally too
greasy for pure line-work.
Pen-drawings which are to be made and reproduced
for the newspaper press at the utmost speed are made
upon lithographic transfer paper in lithographic ink, a
stubborn and difficult material of a fatty nature. Draw-
ings made in this way are not photographed, but
transferred direct to the zinc plate, and etched in a _
very short space of time. No reduction in scale is
possible, and the original drawing is inevitably destroyed /;
in the process of transferring.
Digitized
by Google
WASH DRAWINGS.
Wash drawings for reproduction by half-tone process
should be made upon smooth or finely grained card-
boards. Reeves' London board is very good for the
purpose, and so is a French board they keep, stamped
in the corner of each sheet with the initials A.L. in a
circle. Wash drawings should be made in different
gradations of the same colour if a good result is to be
expected : thus a wash drawing in lampblack should
be executed only in shades of lampblack, and not varied
by the use of sepia in some parts, or of Payne's grey in
others. Lampblack is a favourite material, and excellent
from the photographic point of view. Payne's grey, or
neutral tint, at one time had a great vogue, but it is too
blue in all its shades for altogether satisfactory repro-
duction, although the illustration. The Houses of Par-
liament, shown on p. 122, has come well with its use.
Digitized
by Google
JlJX I7i. THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT AT NIGHT, FROM THE RIVER.
IFask drawing in Payne's grey. Half-tone process ^ medium grain.
Digitized
by Google |t
o
o
o
it*
H
o
H
Q 2
^. .5
Digitized
by Google
124 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
Chinese white was freely used in the drawing, and its
value is shown in putting in the swirls of fog.
Indian ink is capable of producing the greatest range
of tone from light to dark, and successive washes with
it are quite indelible. But it may be said at once that
this great range is not necessary — nay, is not advisable
m drawing for half-tone reproduction. In view of the
unavoidable defects of the half-tone processes which tend
to flatten out the picture, artists should not attempt
many and delicate gradations. Half a dozen tones from
black to white will generally suffice. Any attempt to
secure the thousand-and-one gradations of a photograph
will be at once needless and harmful.
Pure transparent water-colour washes do not give
such good effects in reproduction as work in body-colour.
Chinese white mixed with lampblack comes beautifully.
Charcoal-grey, of recent introduction, is not so well
adapted to the admixture of body-colour. Altogether,
charcoal-grey, although a very admirable colour, is a
difficult material unless you know exactly at starting
a drawing what you intend to do. The illustration,
Victoria Embankment : a Foggy Nighty was made in it
on rough paper. The nature of the subject rendered
Digitized
by Google
1
8 I:
;%
c
t
o
X
Digitized
by Google
^^"^ OF THE
[XTNIVERSI^
Digitized
by Google
joj X 6i.
THE AMBULATORY, DORE ABBEY.
Photograph fainted in parts with body-colour.
Digitized
by Google
^^^ OF THE ^
^UNIVERSITY
Digitized
by Google
WASH DRAWINGS. 1 29
the execution of the drawing easy, but in a drawing
which runs the whole gamut of tone, its unstable qualities
forbid its use by the novice.
The drawings made in wash by Myrbach and Rossi
have set the fashion for much recent illustration. Vig-
nettes made with a full brush and reduced to infinite-
simal proportions have abounded since the illustrated
editions of Tartarin of Tarascon first charmed the eye ;
but now, reduced to the common denominator of the
sixpenny magazines, they have lost all the qualities and
retained all the defects the fashion ever had. The
drawing of Corfe Railway Station was made in washes
of Indian ink with a full brush, each successive wash
left to dry thoroughly before the next was laid on.
Parts are reinforced with pencil strokes : these can
readily be identified in the print. The block was then
vignetted.
Another method is used for half-tone work. A
photograph is mounted upon cardboard, and may be
worked upon in brushwork with body-colour to any
extent, either for lightening the picture or for making
it darker. For working upon the ordinary silver-print
an admixture of ox-gall must be used or the pigments
K
Digitized
by Google
130 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
will not "take" upon the sensitized paper.* The
illustration, The Ambulatory, Dore Abbey, is from a
photograph, worked upon in this manner. The photo
was so dark and indefinite that something was necessary
to be done to show the springing of the arches and the
relation of one pier to another. Chinese white was used
in the manner described above, and the arches outlined
in places by scratching with the sharp point of a
penknife.
Tinted cards may be used in drawing for half-tone,
but yellow tints must be avoided, for obvious photo-
graphic reasons; and blue tints, photographically, are
practically pure white. If tinted cardboard is used at
all, it should be in tints of grey or brown.
A very satisfactory way of working for half-tone is
to work in oil monochrome. The reproductions from
oil sketches come very well indeed by half-tone pro-
cesses : full and vigorous. The photo-engraver always
objects to oil because of its gloss, but this can be
* Refer to The Real Japan, by Henry Norman. Fisher Unwin, 1892.
The book is freely illustrated with half-tone blocks made from photo-
graphs. The photographs were all extensively worked upon with body-
colour in this manner. Indeed, the brushwork may clearly be discerned
in the reproductions.
Digitized
by Google
JVASH DRAWINGS.
131
obviated by mixing your colour with turpentine or
benzine, which give a dull surface. The sketch shown
on p. 130 was made in this way. It was a smoothly
worked sketch, with no aggressive brush-marks, but it
14 X 12. MOONLIGHT : CONFLUENCE OF THE SEVERN AND THE WYE.
Oil sketch on canvas in Paynis grey. Half 'tone process. Fine grain.
may be noted that brush-marks come beautifully by this
process : if anything, rather stronger than in the original,
because the shadows cast by them reproduce as well.
But if you sketch in oils for reproduction, be chary of
Digitized
by Google
132 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
Vigorous brushwork in white : it comes unpleasantly
prominent in the block.
In giving instructions for the reproduction, and
reduction, of drawings, the measurement in one direction
of the reproduction desired should be plainly indicated
thus: < — 4 J inches — >. Unless absolutely unavoidable,
drawings should not be sent marked *' J size," " ^ scale,"
and so on, because these terms are apt to mislead.
People not accustomed to measurements are very un-
certain in their understanding of them, and, absurd as it
may seem to those who deal in mensuration, they very
frequently take ^ scale and ^ size as synonymous terms ;
while J scale is really \ size, and so on, in proportion.
The proportions a drawing will assume when reduced
may be ascertained in this way. You have, say, a
narrow upright drawing, as shown in the above diagram,
and you want the width reduced to a certain measure-
ment, but having marked this off are at a loss to
know what height the reproduction will be. Supposing
it to be a pen-drawing, vignetted, as most pen-drawings
are ; in the first place, light pencil lines touching the
farthest projections of the drawing should be ruled to
each of its four sides, meeting accurately at the angles
Digitized
by Google
JVASH DRAWINGS.
133
A, B, C, D. This frame being made, a diagonal line
should be Hghtly ruled from upper to lower corner,
either — as shown — from B to C, or from A to D. The
measurement of the proposed reduction should then be
marked off upon the base line at E, and a perpendicular
line ruled from it to meet the diagonal. The point of
contact, F, gives the height that was to be found, and a
Digitized
by Google
134 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
horizontal line from F to G completes the diagram, and
gives the correct proportions of the block to be made
It will readily be seen that large copies of small
sketches can be made in exact proportions by a further
application of the diagonal, but care should be taken to
have all these lines drawn scrupulously accurate, because
the slightest deviation throws the proportions all out.
Digitized
by Google
STYLES AND MANNER.
Pen-drawing is ruled by expediency more, perhaps,
than any art. I shall not say that one method is more
right than another in the management of textures, or in
the elaboration or mere suggestion of detail, for line
work is, to begin with, a purely arbitrary rendering of
tones. There is nothing like line in nature. Take up
an isolated brick ; it does not suggest line in any way.
Build it up with others into a wall, and you can in pen
and ink render that wall in many ways that will be
equally convincing and right. It may be expressed in
terms of splatter-work, which can be made to represent
admirably a wall where the bricks have become welded
into an homogeneous mass, individually indistinguishable
by age, or of vertical or horizontal lines that may or may
not take account of each individual brick and the joints
of the mortar that binds the courses together. Cross-
Digitized
by Google
136 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
hatching, though a cheap expedient and a decaying con-
vention, may be used. But to lose sight of ordinary
atmospheric conditions is no more privileged in pen-
work than in paint. This is not by any means unne-
cessary or untimely advice, though it should be. The
fact of using a pen instead of a brush does not empower
anybody to play tricks with the solar system, though one
sees it constantly done. One continually sees in pen-
drawing the laws of light and shade set at naught, and
nobody says anything against it — perhaps it looks
smart. Certainly the effect is novel, and novelty is a
powerful factor in anything. But to draw a wall
shining with a strong diffused light which throws a
great black shadow, is contrary to art and nature both.
** Nature/' according to Mr. Whistler, " may be ' creep-
ing up,' but she has not reached that point yet. When
one sees suns setting behind the east ends of cathedrals,
with other vagaries of that sort, one simply classes such
things with that amusing erratum of Mr. Rider
Haggard's, in which he describes a ship ' steaming out
of the mouth of the Thames, shaping her course toward
the red ball of the setting sun.' " But though the instance
is amusing, the custom is apt to pall.
Digitized
by Google
STYLES AND MAJff!^' o^v^^^y ^
\^universitt]
Some of the American pen-draughtsmen who con-
tribute to the Century are exceedingly clever, and their
handling extremely personal ; but after a time this ex-
cessive personality ceases to charm, and, for one thing,
these young bloods are curiously narrow in their choice
of the masters from whom they are only too pleased to
derive. Mr. Brennan is, perhaps, the most curiously
original of these men. He is the man who has shown
most convincingly that the inked thumb is the most
instant and effective instrumisnt wherewith to render
velvet in a pen-drawing. You cannot fail to be struck
with his method ; his manner is entirely personal, and
yet, after a time, it worries one into intolerance.
It is the same with that convention, founded, appa-
rently, by Mr. Herbert Railton, which has had a long run
of some nine or ten years. It was a convention in pictorial
architecture that had nothing except a remarkably novel
technique to recommend it. The illustrator invited us
rather to see how '* pretty " he could render an old
building, than how nearly he could show it us as it stood.
He could draw an elevation in a manner curiously
feminine, but he could only repeat himself and his
trees; his landscapes were insults to the imagination.
Digitized
by Google
138 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
Nothing inspired him to achievements beyond pictorial
confectionery.
This convention has had its day, although in the
mean while so strikingly mannered was it that it
appealed to almost all the young and undiscriminating
men whose work lay in the rendering of pictorial
architecture. "Go to," said the Average Artist in
" the picturesque," " I will sit down and make a
drawing in the manner of Mr. Railton." And he did,
generally, it may be observed, from a photograph, and
in the undistracting seclusion of his own room. This
sort of artistic influenza, which nearly all the younger
men caught at one time or another, was very dangerous
to true art. But it could not possibly last ; it was so
resourceless. Always we were invited to glance at the
same sky and an unchanging rendering of buildings,
whether old or new, in the same condition of supposedly
picturesque decrepitude. Everything in this manner-
ism wore the romantic air of the Moated Grange and
radiated Mrs. RadclifiFe, dungeons, spectres, and death,
whether the subject was a ruinated castle or a new
warehouse. All this has grown offensive : we want
more sobriety. This apotheosis of raging skies and
Digitized
by Google
STYLES AND MANNER. 139
falling smuts, of impending chimneys, crumbling stones,
and tottering walls was only a personal manner. Its
imitators have rendered it ridiculous.
The chief merits of such topographical and archaeo-
logical drawings are that they be truthful and reverent.
If art is ever to approach the documentary stage, to be
used as the record of facts, it is in this matter. To
flood the country with representations of old buildings
that are not so much pictures of them as exercises in an
exaggerated personal manner, is to deserve ill at the
hands of all who would have preserved to them the
appearance of places that are passing away. The
illustrations to such books, say, as Mr. Loftie's Inns of
Court or his Westminster Abbey are of no historic or
artistic value whatever ; they are merely essays in a
wild and weird manner of which we are tired in the
originator of it ; which we loathe in those who imitate its
worst faults. We require a sober style in this work,
after being drunken so long with its so-called pic-
turesqueness, which, rightly considered, is but impres-
sionism, ill seen and uninstructed.
No one has exercised so admirable a method,
whether in landscape, in portraiture, or in architecture,
Digitized
by Google
I40 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
as Sir George Reid, but his work is not readily acces-
sible for the study it invites. It is scholarly and expres-
sive, eloquent of the character of his subject, free from
redundancies. It is elaborate or suggestive on due
occasion, and, although the style is so distinguished,
you always feel that every drawing by this stylist is
really and truly a representation of the person, place, or
thing he has drawn, and not a mere pretext for an indi-
vidual handling ; no braggart assumption of " side.'*
The dangers of following in a slavish manner the
eccentricities of well-known men are exemplified in the
work of those illustrators who ape the whimsies of the
impressionist Degas. What Degas may do may nearly
always be informed with distinction, but the illustrators
who reproduce, not his genius, but an outstanding
feature ^ of it, are singularly narrow. If Degas has
painted a picture of the play with the orchestra in the
foreground and the bass-viol looming immensely up
three parts of the composition, the third-rate impres-
sionists also lug in a bass-viol ; if he has shown a ballet-
girl with apparently only one leg, they always draw one-
Jegged coryphees, and remain incapable of conceiving
them as bipeds.
Digitized
by Google
STYLES AND MANNER. 141
Caldecott is a dangerous man to copy. He was,
first and last, a draughtsman, and a draughtsman whose
every dot and line were eloquent. There is no technique
that you can lay hold of in his work, but only characteri-
zation, which is more frequently caricature. Caldecott
would never have made a serious illustrator ; in bur-
lesque he was immense, and no artist could desire a
better monument than his Picture Books. His reputa-
tion has fallen greatly of late, notwithstanding the
delightful yi?^;^ Gilpin and the others of that inimitable
series ; but his repute had stood higher to-day if his
private letters to his friends and other unconsidered
trifles had never been collected and published, ghoul -
like, after his death. Pandering to the market has
almost killed Caldecott's repute, for the undiscriminating
public were invited to admire reproductions of hasty
sketches never intended for publicity.
There is character in Mr. Phil May's work, and
humour, surprisingly set forth with a marvellous economy
of line. His is a gay and festive muse, that is most at
home where the tide of life runs strongest and deepest,
with wine-bubbles breaking " most notoriously," as Mr.
Kipling might say, upon its surface ; with theatres, music-
Digitized
by Google
142 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
halls, and Gaiety bars ranged along its banks in profu-
sion. There is much human nature in Mr. May. Also
in Mr. Greififenhagen ; but a different kind. He has gone
chiefly to the boudoir and the drawing-room for his
subjects, and has rendered them with a resolute impres-
sionism and a thorough discarding of cross-hatch that
make a lasting impression with the beholder. There is a
certain Christmas number, 1892, of the Lady's Pictorial
with memorable drawings by him ; they are in wash
and lithographic crayon, but may only be noted here in
passing. He has a gift of novel, unhackneyed composi-
tion, and he sees the figure ' for himself, and draws it in
with a daring but right and striking manner.
There has arisen of late years a school of illustration
peculiarly English — the so to call it " Decorative
School.'* It is a new and higher incarnation of the
pre-Raphaelite movement. The brotherhood did good
work, not at all commensurate with the amount of
attention it received, but beyond all praise in the
conventions it founded ; and, historically considered,
Rossetti and his fellows are great, and Blake is greater,
because he was an inspired visionary with a kink in
his brain, out of which flowed imaginings the most
Digitized
by Google
STYLES AND MANNER.^^'l^^^^ H^^^^^tj^
f OF THE -T^JX
[PNIVERSITY J
gorgeous and original. But the decorative men of
to-day are doing even better work — masculine, con-
vincing, racy of this soil. It is chiefly admirable
because it gives us, in these days of *' actuality," of
photography, and reproductions direct from photo-
graphs, a new outlook upon life. English decorative
illustration is, with but few exceptions, possessed of a
fine romantic fancy, poetic, and at the same time
healthy and virile and eminently sane, and it will live.
There is great hope for the future of this school, while
the imported styles of Vierge and Rico and other
masters used to sunnier skies, admirable beyond
expression in their own places^ droop and languish in
the nor'-easterly winds of England, and their tradition
becomes attenuated in passing through so many hands.
Their descendants, from Abbey down to Pennell and
the whole crowd of those who love not wisely but too
well, have brought these fine exotic conventions down
to the merest shadows of shades.
Mr. Walter Crane has, any time these last ten years,
been the great Apostle of Decoration plus Socialism.
It has been given him in this wise to make (in theory)
the lion to lie down with the lamb (and yet for the
Digitized by
Google
144 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
lamb to remain outside the lion with his destiny of
* mutton still in perspective), and he has proclaimed in
parables the possibility of mixing oil and water. He
has perpetrated a cartoon for the Socialistic, if not
Anarchist, First of May, and therein he has striven to
decoratively treat the British Workman. But although
Mr. Crane has a pretty trick of decoration, he was
worsted in that bout, for the British Plumber or the
Irish Hodman is stubborn material for decoration, and
their spouses as festal nymphs are not convincing
visions. Again, he has achieved a weird series of
cartoons upon the walls of the Red Cross Hall in praise
of Democratic Valour, in which he has unsuccessfully
attempted to conventionalize rescuing firemen and
heroic police. Such bravery deserved a better fate.
Also Mr. Crane has written much revolutionary verse
in praise of brotherhood and equality, and now he has
accepted the mastership of a Governmental art school,
under the direction of that not very revolutionary body,
the Committee of Council for Education (Science and
Art Department). Decoration should be made of
sterner stuff! His industry has been prodigious. Even
now a bibliography of him is in the making; and yet
Digitized
by Google
STYLES AND MANNER. 1 45
shall it be said that it is difficult in the great mass of
his work to find many items altogether satisfactory ?
It may be feared it is so. For one thing, his anatomy
is habitually at fault ; and yet has he not informed an
interviewer from the Pall Mall Gazette that long years
since he had ceased to draw from the model ?
That wheel within wheels, the so-called Birmingham
School, is attracting attention just now, and men begin
to prophesy of deeds from out the midlands. But once
upon a time there was a Newlyn School, was there
not ? Where is that party now } Its foremost
members have won to the honours of the Royal Aca-
demy, and its mission is done. But it is time to talk of
schools whf n work has been done. Of course it is very
logical that good work should come from Birmingham.
The sense of beauty is stronger in those who live in
midst of dirt and grime. Instance the Glasgow school
of impressionists. But the evidence of Birmingham
at present is but a touching follow- on to the styles of
Mr. Crane and Mr. Sumner, and to the ornament of
Mr. Lewis Day. Indeed, the decorative work of the
students at the National Art Training Schools may
be put in the formula of one-third Crane, and the
L
Digitized
by Google
146 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
remaining two-thirds Hey wood Sumner and Lewis
Day, an amalgam ill-considered and poorly wrought.
But indeed Mr. Heywood Sumner's work has a
note of distinction. He does not confuse Socialist
propaganda with ornament, and is not always striving
to show with emphasis of line in pen and ink that
Capital is the natural enemy of Labour, and that a
silk hat on a rich man's head may justly be defined as
so many loaves of bread (or pots of beer) in the wrong
place. That is for Mr. Crane and Mr. William Morris
to prove; and, really, anything wicked can be proven
of such a hideous object. But the onus of bringing
the guilt home to it and the wearer of it does not
produce good art. Indeed, decorative art is not
catholic ; it has no sort of commerce with everyday-
life or with the delineation of any times so recent as
the early years of the Victorian era. Its field lies only
in poetic imaginings, in fancy, and, most emphatically,
not in fact. When Mr. Crane, for instance, takes to
idealising the heroic acts of policemen, the impulse
does credit to his heart, but the results are not flattering
to his head. Fortunately he does not often go these
lengths, and no one else of the decorative idea has been
Digitized
by Google
STYLES AND MANNER. 1 47
equally courageous, save indeed a Mr. Beardsley,
who ** decoratively " illustrated Orpheus at the
Lyceum Theatre; and those illustrations in the Pall
Mall Budget, March 16, 1893, certainly were very
dreadful.
An exception to the general beauty of recent
decorative work is the incomprehensible and at the
same time unlovely practice of this eccentric. Mr.
Charles Ricketts* work, although its meaning may often
be so subtly symbolical that it is not to be understood
except by the elect, — never without the aid of a glossary
of symbolism, — is always graced with interesting techni-
calities, and his draughtsmanship is of the daintiest;
but what of meaning is conveyed to the mind and what
of beauty to the eye in this work of Mr. Beardsley's,
that has been somewhat spoken of lately "i It has
imagination certainly, but morbid and neurotic, with
a savour of Bethlehem Hospital and the charnel-house ;
it is eccentric apparently with an eccentricity that clothes
bad draughtsmanship, and incongruous with an incon-
gruity that suggests the uninstructed enthusiasm of
the provincial mind. It exhibits a patchwork-quilt kind
of eclecticism, born of a fleeting glance at Durer; of
Digitized
by Google
148 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
a nodding acquaintance with all prominent modern
decoration and an irrelevant soupfon of Renaissance
ornament ; like the work of a lithographic draughtsman,
a designer of bill-heads, roaming fancy free.
The practice of Mr. Selwyn Image has a devotional
and meditative cast. He has made some remarkable
drawings for the Hobby Horse in the manner of the
missal-painters, both in spirit and execution, and he
steadfastly keeps the art of the monkish scriptorium
in view, and seems to echo the sentiments of the
rapturous maidens in Patience, " Let us be Early
English ere it is too late." And he is Early English
to excellent purpose.
It is a gross error to hold that decorative art is
impossible under present social conditions, and un-
pardonable to attempt to link decoration and design
to Socialist propaganda. Art of all possible application
never flourished so well as under the feudal system,
and never sank so low as it did -when Democracy and
the Trouser came in together.
The great advantages of Art over Photography are
its personal qualities. The camera is impersonal, and
will ever be a scientific instrument. You can, like the
Digitized
by Google
STYLES AND MANNER. 1 49
ingenious Mr. H. P. Robinson, pose figures, and with a
combination of negatives concoct a composition which is
some sort of cousin-german to a picture ; but if you c^
do all this, you might go a little farther and make a
picture without the aid of a camera. It would be per-
sonal, and, without a signature, signed all over with the
unmistakable mark of style or manner, like Constable's
paintings.
It seems unlikely that any mechanical processes, save
the strictly autographic, which reproduce line, will be of
permanent artistic value. No photogravure will be
sought for and prized in years to come as the old
etchings and mezzotints are valued. Those elaborate
photogravure plates from popular or artistic pictures
(the terms are not synonymous) which crowd the print-
sellers* shops to-day, at five or ten guineas, will not long
hence be accounted dear at so many shillings, simply
because they lack the personal note. Meanwhile, mezzo-
tints and etchings, other than the ** commercial " etching,
will become inversely expensive.
In that brackish flood of ** bitter cries " to which we
have been subjected of late years, the wail of the wood-
engraver was easily to be distinguished, and we heard
Digitized
by Google
I50 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
that his occupation was gone. But has it ? No, nor
will it go. No tint nor half-tone process can ever
render sufficiently well the wash drawings that the best
engravers render so admirably, with an entire subjection
of their own individuality unthought of twenty years
ago. The wood-engraver, as one who imposes restric-
tions upon technique, has had his day ; but as a
conscientious and skilful workman, who renders faith-
fully the personality of the artist he engraves, he
flourishes, and will continue to flourish. Otherwise,
there is no hope for him, let Mr. Linton say what he will.
He will remain because he can preserve the personal note.
Half-tone processes are as tricky as Puck and as
inconstant. You never know the exact result you will
get from any given drawing. Half a dozen blocks from
the same drawing will give, each one, a different result,
because so much depends upon the fraction of a second,
more or less, in making the negative ; but all of them
agree in presenting an aspect similar to that obtained
on looking through the wire blind of some Philistine
window upon the street. In all cases the edge, the
poignancy of the subject, is taken off", and, in the case
of the process-blpck, several intermediate tones go as
Digitized
by Google
STYLES AND MANNER. 151
well, with, frequently, the result of an unnatural lighting
" that never was on land or sea," and it may be hoped
never will be.
No doubt half-tone processes will continue to be
more and more widely used, chiefly because they are
several times cheaper than a good wood engraving, and
because, so far as mere documentary evidAce goes,
they are good enough for illustrated journalism. But
for bookwork, for anything that is not calculated for
an ephemeral consideration, half-tone processes are only
to be used with the most jealous care.
As regards the half-tone processes employed to
reproduce photographs, I take leave to say that no
one will, a hundred years hence, prize them for any
quality. The necessary reticulation of their surface
subtracts from them something of the documentary
value of the photograph, and, deriving directly from
photographs, they have no personal or artistic interest.
But their present use touches the professional
draughtsman nearly, for in illustrated journalism half-
tone is very frequently used in reproducing photographs
of places and people without the aid of the artist, and it
is no consolation for a man who finds his occupation
Digitized
by Google
152 DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
going for him to consider that these direct photographic
processes have no permanent interest. It is the new
version of the old tale of the stage-coach versus the
railway engine, to his mind, and he is apt to think that
as a craftsman he is fast following the wood-engraver.
But it is safe to say that although the mediocrities will
suffer, or be forced, like the miniature-painter who turned
daguerrotypist and then blossomed forth as a photo-
grapher, to study practical evolution, the artists of style
and distinction will rather gain than lose by a further
popularity of cheap photographic blocks. The illus-
trated papers and magazines will not be so freely open
to them as before, but in the illustration of books will
lie their chief field, and who knows but that by such a
time the pen-drawing and the drawing in wash will
have won at last to the picture-frame and the art
galleries. There's distinction for you !
So much to show the value of personality.
Still it remains that, although the personal element
will always be valued, the fact — to paraphrase a sound-
ing Ruskinian anathema— gives no reason for flinging
your identity in the face of your contemporaries, or even
of posterity (this last a long shot which few, with all the
Digitized
by Google
STYLES AND MANNER. 1 53
will in the world, will be able to achieve). You may
be startlingly original and brilliant in technique, and be
received with the acclaim that always awaits a novelty ;
but if your personality be so exaggerated that you allow
it to override the due presentment of your subject,
why, then, your plaudits will not be of very long
continuance.
nXNIVERSITT)
Digitized
by Google
PAINTERS' PEN-DRAWINGS.
It is to the painters that we owe some curious and
original effects in pen-drawing, that no professional
pen-draughtsman who has studied the science of repro-
duction could have given us, however independent his
attitude towards process.
Painters who have known nothing whatever of
processes have from time to time been called upon
to make pen-drawings from their paintings for repro-
duction in illustrated exhibition catalogues, and their
drawings have frequently been both of the most
ludicrously impossible character from the process point
of view, and bad from the independent penman's stand-
point. But a percentage of this painters' pen-work,
done as it was with a free hand and an unprejudiced
brain, is curiously instructive. A very great number
of painters pen-drawings have been made up to within
Digitized
by Google
I
Digitized
by Google
156
DRAWING FOR REBRODUCTION,
the last few years (since which time half-tone process
blocks produced from photos of their pictures have
superseded them), and painters have in no small measure
PORTRAIT OF MR. BONNAT, BY HIMSELF.
helped to advance the science of process-work, merely by
reason of the difficulty of reproducing their drawings
adequately, and the consequent renewed efforts of the
Digitized
by Google
PAINTERSl PEN-DRA WINGS. I 5 7
process-man toward the adequate translation of their
frequently untranslateable qualities. The graver has
been pressed into the service of process partly on their
account, and the roulette has been used freely to assuage
the crudities resulting on the block from drawings
utterly unsuitable for straight-away processing.
In this connection half-tone processes have done
inestimable harm, for, to-day, the catalogues and the
illustrated papers are filled with photographic reproduc-
tions of paintings where in other days autographic
sketches by the painters themselves were used to give
a value that is now lacking to these records of
exhibitions.
They have frequently a heavy hand, these painters,
and are prodigal of their ink ; moreover, they have
not the paralyzing dread of an immaculate sheet of
white cardboard that seizes upon the black-and-white
man (so to call the illustrator), who is brought up with
the fear of the process-man before him.
Thus you will find Mr. Wyllie make pen-sketches
from his pictures with a masterful hand, and a pen
(apparently a quill) that plumbs the deepest depths of
the inkpot, and produces a robustious drawing that
f ^ OF THE ^ \
(XTNIVERSITT,
Digitized
by Google
I
:§
^
Digitized
by Google
PAINTERS' PEN-DRAWINGS. 1 59
wrings conviction out of one by the thickness and surety
of its lines ; or again, Mr. Blake Wirgman shows equal
vigour and directness with portraits in pen-and-ink,
replicas in little of his oil-paintings. One could desire
nothing more masculine than the accompanying illus-
tration from his hand.
A PORTRAIT FROM A DRAWING BY MR. T. BLAKE WIRGMAN.
A striking exception to these is seen in Mr. Alfred
Hartley*s drawing of a pasturage. It is full of tender,
pearly greys, and is drawn with the lightest of hands,
but with a peculiar disposition of pen-strokes that no
professional pen-draughtsman would employ, because
of his constant care to give the process-man the easiest
Digitized
byGopgle
l6o DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION.
of problems. And the autocrat of the rocking-bath
and the etching-room would veto such work as this ;
yet, you will observe, it comes excellently well by the
ordinary zinc processes.
But with Mr. David Murray*s large pen-drawing
it was another matter. The greyness of the ink with
which it was drawn and the extreme tenuity of its
lines rendered it impossible of adequate reproduction
except by the swelled gelatine process which has been
employed. The result is admirable ; all the fine grey
lines in the sky are reproduced and give an excellent'
effect.
The portrait of the painter, Mr. Bonnat, by himself,
is one of the most suggestive pen- drawings that can
be found anywhere. It shows what admirable effects
of light and shade and modelling can be obtained
even with the heavy hand, and it is worthy careful
study.
Unfortunately the illustrations in the long series of
Academy Notes, in which so many autographic sketches
by painters appear, are almost useless for study and
comparison, because of the extreme reduction to which
they have been subjected. This is greatly to be
Digitized
by Google
PAINTERS* PEN-DRAWINGS,
l6l
deplored, for the tendency of the times is more and
more towards drawing for the limitations of process, not
only in journalism, but in the more permanent illustra-
tions of magazines and books. AH this tends to bring
about a hard and formal line, to establish a dry and
unsatisfactory academic manner, of which the painter's
pen sketches are the very antithesis. It is always well
to remember that the only valid reason why process
should live is that it enables the draughtsman to live his
life at first hand ; that is the first and last argument in
favour of modern methods of reproduction.
M
Digitized
by Google
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED*
LONDON AND BECCLKS.
Digitized
by Google
REEVES & SONS, Ltd.,
SUPPLY ARTISTS WITH ALL REQUISITES FOR PROCESS.
SPECIAL CATALOGUE IN THE PRESS.
Tclc«nipliio AfldrcM, "Ukmoko. London.*'
23, St EDMUNDS TERRACE,
f^EGENT'8 PARK.
London, mw nov i6th i893. /^^
Baal mnt)g\imr) ty*vS».
f b. e.p». ^c.
Dear Sirs,
After working exclusively Tith ycruT •Artist's
Slaclc" Ink. for some weeks I have great pleasure In testi-
fying to its excellence; indeed it is just irhat la ■wmnted
"by "black and Thite artists noir that they have to Tork
almost solely for process. »
Paithfully yoxirs,
J^'^^-r/?!
Messrs Reeves & Sons.
No Af cat*. All CooMnnaioatlons diroct.
REEVES & SONS, LTD.,
113^ Cheapside^ London ; 8^ Exhibition Rd., S. Kensington ;
and 19^ Lower Phillimore Place, Kensington.
Digitized
by Google
stumps
Bristol Boards.
BlackTwhite
^t^Mi^i "^
Sable
GiMot Papere.
Pyramid
REEVES' ARTISTS' BLACK,
FIXED ARTISTS' BLACK,
FIXED INDIAN INK,
AND EBONY STAIN
IN BOTTLES.
Artists' Black, in Tubes, Pans, and Sticks.
REEVES' CHINESE WHITE.
" The best I have ever used,''— DvDLEY Hardy.
Digitized
by Google
PHOTO-ENGRAVERS
Br ALL THE LATEST PROCESSES.
HARE & CO., Ltd.
21, Essex Street, Strand,
SEND FOR SAMPLES.
ijit3)anuatp, 1894.
3, SuHsate &\xtm i^uilUmg^,
BUSINESS is conducted nowadays on many diflferent principles. Ours
is to supply only the highest class of artistic engraving of every
description at the lowest price admitting of fair payment to all con-
cerned in its production. All special methods are within our scope, and
will be employed when called for by the exceptional requirements of any
order entrusted to us.
SWELLED GELATINE PHOTO-RELIEF BLOCKS-
Wax EngraviDgs of Hfaps, Diagrams, &c.
PHOTOGRAVURE INTAGLIO PLATES.
Digitized
by Google
WATERLOW & SONS,
LIMITED,
Pbotogtapbic act ptintets anti (ZEngcatiet^,
FINSBURY ^VORKS, LONDON, E.G.
Photo-Zincography.
Photo-Lithography.
Photo-Hechanical Printing.
^ollotxipc, — Hand and Machine Printing for Art Publications, Scientific and Anti-
quarian Periodicals, Machinery, Landscapes, Portraits, Pottery, Furniture
Designs, Trade Advertisements, &c The superior results given by this
process, and the rapidity and cheapness by which the prints are produced,
together with the advantage of printing with or without margins, place it in
the first rank of processes for commercial purposes.
MESSRS. WATERLOW^ & SONS, LIMITED, have given
this branch of the Photo-Printing Department special facilities for the pro-
duction of good work, and have introduced the most perfect machinery
and plant obtainable.
"ggooMburg "prints. — High-class permanent copies, equal in appearance to the
best Silver Prints, of Portraits, Landscapes, Furniture, Pottery, &c. Prints
may be obtained in almost any colour from Customers' own Negatives, or
from the original objects. These reproductions are specially suitable for
Portrait work, and are valuable for every description of Artistic or Commercial
Illustrations.
"^l^OfO-gincO gngtat)inf|.— Blocks for Surface Printing, from Line and
Grained-paper Drawings, Steel and Copper Plates, Wood Engravings, &c.,&c.
Letter-press Blocks in "Half-tint" (stipple or dot) direct from Photographs
from Nature, without drawing.
Accurately registered Blocks for Chromographic Printing. Intaglio
Engraving in Line and Half-tone on Copper and Zinc.
The greatest care and skill is employed in the production of these Blocks,
and the results are the finest which it is possible to obtain.
The new and extensive Photographic Works being fitted with Modern
Appliances, Machinery, Electric Lighting, &c., rapid and accurate work is
always obtainable, irrespective of weather or season.
PRICE IjISTS, estimates, and full particulars on application.
WATERLOW & SONS, Limited, Finsbury Works, E.G.
Digitized
by Google
ART PUBLICATIONS.
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OP DESIGN. An advanced
Text-book on Decorative Design. Being a sequel to the Author's *' Lessons on
Decorative Design." ^y Frank G. Jackson. With 700 Illustrations. Large
crown 8vo. 9^.
A TEXTBOOK OP ELEMENTARY DESIGN. By Richard
G.^Hatton, Durham College of Science. Fully Illustrated. Crown 8vo. 2s, 6d,
EGYPTIAN ART. By Charles Ryan, late Head Master of the
Ventnor School of Art. With 56 Illustrations, Crown 8vo. 2s, 6d,
THE STREET OP HUMAN HABITATIONS. By Mrs. Ray
S. LiNEHAM. Fully Illustrated. Crown 8vo. dr.
ELEMENTARY ART TEACHING. By Edward R. Taylor,
Head Master of Birmingham. Municipal School of Art. With over 600 Diagrams
and Examples. Second Edition. 8vo. lox. 6d, .
PRINCIPLES OP ORNAMENT. By James Ward. Edited by
G. AiTCHisoN, A.R.A. Fully Illustrated. Crown 8vo. Js, 6d.
ELEMENTARY PRINCIPLES OP ORNAMENT. By James
Ward, Head Master of the Macclesfield School of Art, 8vo. $s,
SCIOGRAPHY; or, Parallel and Radial Projection of
Shadows. Being a Course of Exercises for the use of Students in Architectural
and Engineering Drawing, and for Candidates preparing for the Examinations
in this subject and in Third Grade Perspective conducted by the Science and
Art Department, By Robert Pratt. With numerous Plates. Oblong 4to.
^s. 6d,
WOOD-CARVING IN PRACTICE AND THEORY, as applied
to the Home Arts, with Notes on Design having Special Application to Carved
Wood in Different Styles. By Francois Louis Schauermann. Preface by
Walter Crane. With 124 Illustrations. Second Edition. 8vo. 5r.
DECORATIVE DESIGN. An Elementary Text-book of Principles
and Practice. By F. G. Jackson. Fully Illustrated. Second Edition. Large
crown 8vo. *js, 6d,
HANDBOOK OP PERSPECTIVE. By H. A. James, M.A.
Cantab. With 75 Diagrams. Crown 8vo. 25, 6d,
LONDON : CHAPMAN & HALL, Ld.
Digitized
by Google
ART PUBLICATIONS— continued.
LIFE IN ANCIENT EGYPT AND ASSYRIA. By G.
Masp^ro. Translated by A. P. Morton. With i88 Illustrations. Third
Thousand. Crown 8vo. ^s,
RAPH AEL : His Life, Works, and Times. By Eugene Muntz.
Imperial 8vb. '2$s,
TEN LECTURES ON ART. By E. J. Poynter, R.A. Third
Edition. Large crown 8vo. 9^.
THE SCULPTOR AND ART STUDENT'S GXJIDEJto the
PFop^Ttions of the Human Form, with Measurements in feet and inches of FuU-
Grown Figures of Both Sexes and of Various Ages. Translated by J. J. Wright.
Plates reproduced by J. SUTCLIFFE. Oblong Folio. 31 J. 6d,
OUTLINES OP HISTORIC ORNAMENT. By G. Redgrave.
Translated from the German. Edited by G. Redgrave. Crown 8vo. 4J.
THE CHARACTERISTICS OP STYLES. An Introduction to
the Study of the History of Ornamental Art. By R. N. Wornum. Ninth
Edition. Royal 8vo. 8j.
THE MYTHOLOGY OF GREECE AND ROME, with Special
Reference to its Use in Art. From the German. Edited by G. H. Bianchi.
64 Illustrations. New Edition. Crown 8vo. $s,
G. PERROT and C CHIPIEZ.
A HISTORY OP ANCIENT ART IN GREECE. With about
500 Illustrations. 2 vols.
A HISTORY OP ANCIENT ART IN PHGSNICIA, CYPRUS,
AND ASIA MINOR. 500 Illustrations. 2 vols. Imperial 8vo. 42s.
A HISTORY OP ART IN ANCIENT EGYPT. With 616
Illustrations. 2 vols. Imperial 8vo. 42s.
A HISTORY OP ART IN CHALDiBA AND ASSYRIA.
With 452 Illustrations. 2 vols. Imperial 8vo. 42^.
A HISTORY OP ANCIENT ART IN SARDINIA, JUDiBA,
SYRIA, AND ASIA MINOR. With 395 Illustrations. 2 vols. Imperial
8vo. 36J.
A HISTORY OP ANCIENT ART IN PERSIA. With 254
Illustrations, and 12 Steel and Coloured Plates. Imperial 8va 21s,
A HISTORY OP ANCIENT ART IN PHRYGIA-LYDIA
AND CARIA-LYCIA. With 280 Illustrations. Imperial 8vo. 151.
LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, Ld.
,' ^ CFTHF '^
UNIVERSIT r;
Digitized
by Google
Digitized
by Google
^^6:
THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE
STAMPED BELOW
AN INITIAL PINE OP 25 CENTS
WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO oJ^
THIS BOOK ON THP r,»^/^ ^ ^° "CTURN
OVERDUE. ™^ SEVENTH DAY
|II(F
'4:i'e'A
NOV 15 1937
rr--WQV_lS_1932.
Woo
n4B
-** ^'i:
^«^
^AlJ(^
REC'D LD
-fttt6^^"64-afW-
€i>:4>rv
bW^sJ"?
LD21-95w-7.'37l
L-i. >-i « C
OA^ ffX^
I
Oicjinzeo by 'v_:3 0'
Live Music Archive
Librivox Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Internet Arcade
Console Living Room
Books to Borrow
Open Library
TV News
Understanding 9/11